


Whatever Lies Beyond This Morning (is a little later on)

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Category: Tales of the Abyss
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, Past Abuse, Past Violence, background Asch/Natalia, flips off the big bang and backflips into the sunset, look i don't know what to tell you we touch on Asch and Van's relationship, nobody has a happy backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 02:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17133623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: A direct postscript to Tales of the Abyss. There are two years where Luke simply isn't, where he's getting put back together. And what of Asch?Had they but world enough, and time, perhaps they could learn to understand each other. Patches of sunlight are often broader than they look.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [purplejabberwock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplejabberwock/gifts).



> Title shamelessly cribbed from Simple & Clean, by Utada Hikaru. 
> 
> This story literally would not exist without Pur. Ascribe blame and/or thanks there as well.

Asch is weightless as he falls down into Luke’s arms.

For a moment Luke doesn’t know if he’s real, if he’s just wishful-thinking it with how much he wants Asch to be _not dead_. But it’s real, Asch — Asch’s body — is real. The scent of blood hangs thick in the air and burns the back of his throat; he’s never quite gotten used to it. Metal clanks off rubble as weapons fall from Asch. _Out of_ Asch.

Without the swords, Luke can’t see the killing wounds in the black and red of Asch’s tabard. But they must be there; Asch is horrible, ghostly pale when Luke sees his face, the split lip too red and the bruise on his cheek standing out too dark.

He looks dead.

It aches. It isn’t _fair_. Luke’s been trying so hard to invite Asch back into the life he took, trying to reach out and bring him home, and now —

If one of them had to die, it shouldn’t have been him. Something raw is trying to rip its way out of Luke’s lungs. In stubbornness he holds Asch just that much closer to him, gripping tight, too tight. Some wild hopeful thought expects Asch to complain, to snarl about how that _hurts, idiot_ , and Luke doesn’t dare look down again for what it will remind him of.

But: the warmth of Asch’s presence inside him hasn’t ever left, not really. Luke’s heart beats wild against his ribs, caught caged between hope and grief.

Lorelei is free. They did what they came to do. That’s what matters, right?

The press of fonons and raw power in the air keeps Luke upright when he might have buckled, blurs the surroundings to light and void, nothing but the ringing of words in Luke’s mind and the slow pressing weight of Asch’s reality against his body.

_You have done admirably_.

_Then why_ , Luke thinks desperately. _Why is Asch_ …

Like a baby bird, something flutters. The lightest of feathers brushing the bars of a cage, only deep within Luke’s mind. He holds his breath. He might still be imagining it. Imagining that some warmth lingers in the body to match that which trembles in his head.

Luke has a promise to keep. But _Asch does too, dammit_ —

He thinks something brushes against his leg. A flexing of fingers, maybe. Please. _Please_. Light suffuses both of them, and Luke has lost all concept of where they are, when they are, only that Asch is still there, if only he will stay.

At least whatever nothingness they’re in is safe. That, Luke knows without guessing. It feels like home, if home had ever been a lack of walls. There might even be solid ground beneath his feet.

He draws a breath that tastes like selenia flowers and bends his head to look.

Asch still looks dead. Luke tries to swallow grief and looks again, no matter how much he wants to wail. He’s learned that much. Emotions after what must be done. If he’s busy crying he might miss something important. He has to be _sure_.

_You have to live_ , he says, or maybe thinks, somewhere between his voice and his mind. _You made a promise to Natalia._

The weight of weariness, of exhaustion and giving-up, settles over Luke’s shoulders as the warmth in his mind starts fading. Asch _is_ still there, if he’ll stay — he can’t give up, he’s not allowed to give up, not after all this. Luke yells at him, wordless, all sound and emotion. Whatever this is, wherever they are, Asch is _staying with him_. He can’t give up a moment before Luke does, or he’ll have to acknowledge that Luke is _superior_ , and Luke isn’t giving up on whatever thready home lingers in his arms.

Under closed lids, Asch’s eyes flicker.

_Yes_. Luke wiggles one arm just far enough to prod him in the cheek. And then remembers the grievous wounds. Even if Asch _is_ alive for now, what’s Luke going to do about it? All the gels were in Anise’s bag, and for all that Luke’s more or less a seventh fonist, all that’s good for is hyperresonance. He’s never learned to heal like Tear or Natalia can.

All over again Luke feels like crying, and he swallows past the lump in his throat, carefully lowers Asch toward the ground that probably exists. He can’t make things worse, anyway, can he? Maybe he can stop the bleeding with cloth.

He’s about to try lifting the tabard to see about the wounds underneath when Asch slits open one vivid green eye. Luke’s heart leaps into his throat.

“You’re alive.” His words echo strangely, but he can’t really care when Asch is _alive_.

Asch tries to say something, but it comes out whistling, a bubble of blood on his lips and the wheeze of lungs that can’t hold air. All Luke’s brief joy vanishes in an instant with this reminder. Asch might be alive, but how long will that last?

_Upright_ finally echoes in Luke’s head, a creak of a thought ringing like his headaches used to.

Luke gets his arms under Asch’s shoulders and lifts him. Asch’s legs scrabble weakly for some kind of purchase and between them they struggle, against the surface beneath them and the frailty of Asch’s failing body, until Asch is at least mostly kneeling. Even this much has exhausted him; he’s gray around the edges, eyes sunken hollows with bare flickers of green.

If Luke wasn’t supporting him, he doubts Asch would be upright. At least that horrible drag of failing breath seems maybe a little less bad this way.

_Maybe_ a little less bad. That’s all Luke can hope for, right now.

Finally a half-choked sob does make it out of Luke, and he folds his arms around Asch’s shoulders, taking shameless advantage of the fact that Asch doesn’t have the strength to argue. If there’s nothing else, if this is all Luke can do, he can make sure Asch isn’t alone, that Asch _knows_ he isn’t. It isn’t their parents’ love, it isn’t Natalia’s promise.

Asch’s head falls against Luke’s shoulder and Luke lets out his breath, draws another shuddering one in. Please. _Please don’t die_.

_Who said anything about dying, idiot_. There’s no real venom to it; only the exhausted need to keep Luke at arm’s length even now. _Not with the way you’re yelling at me. Aren’t you done yet, replica?_

This would be somewhat more convincing coming from someone who could breathe or sit upright on his own.

But it’s reassuring, if only a little. Luke draws breath more steadily. Next steps, then.

Now what?

_We’re surrounded by the seventh fonon and you’re asking me now what_.

Luke is pretty sure he hadn’t actually asked, had just been kind of thinking it to himself. Where’s the line, in this place? Normally it’s really easy to tell when the link between them is open. And anyway, just because they’re surrounded by the seventh fonon doesn’t mean Luke can _do_ anything with it. That’s a different problem.

At least the fact that Asch has enough mental fortitude to yell at him is both familiar and heartening.

Luke gets the definite impression that Asch cannot _believe_ this. But he doesn’t stir to move, either, only leans against Luke limply. Mental insults are all he can do. …That’s okay. Luke can hold Asch like this for as long as he needs to.

_Nobody asked you to_.

“Yeah, well, maybe you need a hug,” Luke retorts, stung into actual words. He discovers as he says it he actually means it; he isn’t picking something just to argue.

Who would have hugged Asch, in the last seven years? He can’t picture Master Van doing that. “I need to hold you up, anyway,” he adds, trying to think of how Jade would talk Asch into putting up with this. “You said you wanted to be upright, didn’t you?”

_You’re transparent_. But for all that grumbling, Luke doesn’t feel like there’s a real objection there. Asch could have been yelling for Luke to let go of him, or something. He isn’t. He’s just leaning into Luke, slumped and mostly motionless, and making his best efforts to breathe.

It’s weird. Every time Asch exhales, Luke sort of hears chimes, sees something bright at the corners of his eyes.

— That’s right. They’re surrounded by the seventh fonon, aren’t they? He doesn’t know for sure if any part of Lorelei is still here with them, but it kind of _feels_ like it. If anything could heal Asch, it would be Lorelei, right?

Impatience comes over him then, like of _course_ that’s the answer, but it doesn’t feel like he’s feeling it. No, it seems like it comes from Asch.

Well, as long as Asch has the energy to be annoyed with him, that has to be a good thing. Luke rests his head on Asch’s shoulder in turn, breath ruffling stray pieces of crimson hair. Asch’s narrow-slit gaze edges sideways until they can look at each other.

He looks so _tired_.

_I don’t need your pity_.

Even that sounds tired. “I’m not pitying you,” Luke says with a frown. He’s got to figure out how to keep his thoughts from leaking. “I’m hugging you. There’s a difference.”

Asch makes a noise like a soaked cat.

“I’m not,” Luke insists. He is a little. “How did you think you were going to keep your promise to Natalia, without coming home with us? Everything’s done now. Master — Van’s dead. You can come home.”

Asch doesn’t respond to this. The eye fixed on Luke closes.

Immediately panic jumps in Luke’s chest, and he nudges Asch til there’s a response in the form of a tiredly cranky glare. _What_.

“You can’t fall asleep,” Luke protests. “You’re barely breathing.” Asch can’t die here. Not after everything. If he falls asleep, he might not wake up.

_I’m tired_. The words slipping into his head bring with them a weight of fatigue that makes Luke’s vision hazy. Reflexively he tightens his grip. Asch grunts, pained, and Luke flinches in turn, loosens his arms again. _There’s no point in dying now. You’re too loud. Just… let me rest._

Luke finds himself both irritated and pleased by that in equal amounts. Too loud for Asch to die, huh. “Fine,” he says grudgingly. How long _has_ it been, since Asch could rest? And he was injured all this time, too. “But you have to keep breathing.”

It shouldn’t be a lot to ask, but exhaustion still bears his shoulders down too, and the blood…

No, he’ll keep making sure Asch is breathing.

Asch slumps a little more against him, eyes closed again. Luke moves a hand to rest gingerly on his back, fingers spread, feeling the faintest rise and fall and reassured by it. He can’t find any dampness, which is… probably good? Definitely good.

Rise, and fall. The faint ringing like a healing arte in his ears.

Please. Asch has to be okay.

Rise. Fall.

It isn’t just Luke’s imagination, he’s sure now. The rhythm of Asch’s breath has gotten steadier, sounds a little firmer, less like there’s blood in his lungs. The steadying rhythm is dangerously relaxing, but Luke keeps shaking himself awake. He has to keep an eye on Asch.

Has to make sure Asch keeps breathing.

Rise. Fall.

Asch is warmer to the touch than he was, too. Luke turns his head so it’s more comfortable on Asch’s shoulder, and drifts. Just a little bit, really. Not enough to not keep track of Asch’s breath. But as long as he does that, it’s okay to just be right here and not think of anything else, isn’t it? Only Asch breathing.

Only breath. Only…

Luke only wakes when he realizes he’s slept. His arms aren’t around Asch any more, and he feels emptier. For a moment his heart leaps into his throat again, the panic of Asch _not being there_ pulling him up to his feet with pounding fear. “Asch —!”

There’s Asch. Not very far — though it’s hard to tell distance here, in this sort of a place that isn’t a place really. Asch is dark against the pale void. Near him the black and crimson tabard is crumpled on the floor, discarded, and Asch is standing even though he holds himself like it pains him to: one arm tucked against his chest and shoulders curved in, posture stooped.

Upright. Breathing. Alive. Luke grins and can’t even help it. Wherever they are, whatever happened, Asch is alive. They freed Lorelei _and_ Asch is alive. He’d almost started to think it wasn’t possible to save anything without sacrificing something else.

Asch turns, probably in response to Luke’s thoughts. He still looks too pale, but Luke’s not about to be dissatisfied by that when he thought Asch was dead… how long ago was it? How long have they been asleep?

What _is_ this place, really?

Some of Asch’s usual angry demeanor is absent as he comes over. …Limps over. Luke makes a face at him and starts to try to help, but is met with a scowl as soon as he makes a single motion that way.

Luke stays where he is. There are some things that aren’t worth fighting.

A few paces away Asch stops. He tries to straighten his shoulders and grimaces, curling in again as soon as he makes the effort. “I think we’re inside Lorelei,” he says without anything like a greeting.

“We’re what?”

“Inside —”

“No, I _heard_ you,” Luke says, before Asch can irritate himself doing stupid things. “I mean, how can we be inside Lorelei?”

Apparently this is just as stupid a question, judging by the look Asch levels at him. “It’s our fonon frequency,” he says after a moment, slowing his words like he’s explaining to a kid. Luke can’t entirely blame him. “Since it’s the same as Lorelei’s… I wouldn’t be surprised if our fonons got pulled in. They’re the same, so they want to be together. Get it?”

That makes sense, actually. It might be the most patient Asch has ever been with him. Luke looks up and around, taking in as much of the not-space they’re in as he can. It’s not quite white — white would be too bright. Whatever the color is, it’s neutral, light enough to see by, and he can’t see any surface or end.

And there’s definitely a floor. They’re standing on it, so it has to be there.

All the same, the only real, true thing there is Asch. Luke returns to focusing on him, all stark black and red made darker by their surroundings. “Are we in the fon belt?”

Asch’s mouth curves down. “I don’t know,” he admits, slow and unhappy about it. “If you killed Van, and Lorelei was released, then it should have gone there. And there’s nothing but — this —” He gestures around them, winces, and tucks his arm again. “I’ve looked. This place may not even be _real_.”

If this place isn’t real, then where are their bodies? Luke thinks about options including the fon belt and the planet’s core, and decides he isn’t sure he actually wants to know. And if Asch doesn’t know, Luke probably can’t figure it out either.

“Do you think Lorelei’s healing us?” he asks instead. One night of sleep — if it was that — wouldn’t have improved Asch this much without some help. He was almost dead.

“Hmph.” Asch draws his hand away from his chest, turning it over. With a twist of his lips he strips that glove off, then the other, tossing them absently in the direction of his discarded tabard. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t.” He presses his hand to his chest again, more deliberately, and lifts it to show only the faintest traces of blood on his bare fingers. “Happy now?”

His words are bitter. “Yes,” Luke says, completely ignoring the sarcasm. He _is_ happy Asch is alive. “We thought you were dead. I was… Natalia was…”

He doesn’t know how to put it in words that will get past the lump in his throat. Or which will make sense to Asch. Nothing seems like it could quite sum up that moment of knowing, horrible and sure and sinking, that Asch would never come home with them, never keep his promise to Natalia…

Asch shifts, looking nettled and uncomfortable.

… Hang on a moment. Luke’s been feeling some of Asch’s emotions as well as his thoughts. His disbelief, his exhaustion. His irritation, though that one’s not hard to guess at. Maybe it’s because of how close they were before they were here, or how their fon slots were opened to each other…

Maybe Luke can do it on purpose. 

He bites his lip, ignoring the defensive and deeply skeptical look he’s getting from Asch, and actively tries to shove those remembered feelings in Asch’s direction, like he can bundle it all up — wrenching grief and knowing there is no time for it and crying out anyway — into something physical and push it into Asch’s arms.

Asch actually staggers then, suddenly gone all slack-faced and confused. His eyes are weirdly bright. Luke doesn’t know what it looks like when he’s trying not to cry, but he bets it looks a lot like that, actually. “What the _hell_ ,” Asch demands finally, recovering himself out of that terrible confusion, and there’s an angry slant to his mouth. “How are you doing that?”

Luke tries briefly to imagine a version of this conversation where Asch _doesn’t_ start yelling at him. His imagination fails. “I’m not sure,” he says. Which is true. It’s awfully abstract, whatever he just did, and he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to explain it to Jade’s satisfaction. “But, I mean, we’re connected, so —”

Asch sneers, turns away. It looks like he’s done with this conversation, even if Luke doesn’t know where Asch thinks he’s going to go.

Okay. Think. What’s wrong with the conversation? What did Luke say wrong? Luke puzzles over this, eying Asch’s hunched shoulder. Well, when is Asch the twitchiest? _He’s always grumpy_ isn’t exactly helpful. It has to be to do with what Luke is saying. Which… puts Luke right back where he started.

Asch might not like Luke, but he likes it even less when Luke isn’t up to his impossible standards. So the answer is what, don’t be stupid?

It’s not the useful answer Luke was hoping for. He can guess, at least, that if a fact is obvious to him, it’s obvious to Asch, so there’s no point in saying it at all. But then what was _Asch_ thinking, asking something he already knows the answer to?

“You’re thinking so hard it’s going to give me a headache,” Asch complains, before Luke can finish working through everything else.

That’s probably possible, here. Luke frowns briefly. “I thought you didn’t realize,” he says after a moment. It’s the why, not the how Asch asked about, but it’s all he can think of. “That there were people who would care if you died.”

Asch whirls on Luke, going pale — paler — and then his eyes narrow. Luke braces himself. “I was _already dying_ ,” Asch bites out. “I wasn’t about to sit around and waste my time feeling sorry about it when there were more important things to do.”

Even if he says that, Luke can’t help but think about Natalia and Asch in Sheridan, watching the sun set and talking softly about a promise made, a promise that could yet be kept. And he doesn’t understand — why wouldn’t Asch want to come back? Even knowing he was dying. Why would he be so determined to die alone? “Not even —”

“Would you _shut up_ about Natalia!”

In the deafening silence that follows, Luke isn’t sure if Asch had just predicted him that well, or if some thought of the memory traveled between them. He also isn’t sure it matters right now. The two of them stare at each other, time stretching out. “Doesn’t she matter?” Luke demands, rallying, when the silence is so loud that even dumb thoughts will do. “Doesn’t she —”

“Of course she matters!” That comes out of Asch fast and sudden, like he isn’t expecting it himself. “This isn’t _about_ her, you idiot.”

“Then what _is_ it about?” Luke snaps back, when Asch doesn’t say anything more. “I don’t understand! Why do you _want_ to die?”

The silence that results from _this_ question is a softer, more dangerous one. “Funny,” Asch says, not meaning it at all. “You were the one begging for it at the Tower of Rem.”

“That’s —” Luke starts, and he goes hot with a terrible sort of shame. Even now, with it so recent, he doesn’t like to think of that stretch of time. He would have died; he was terrified, but he would have. If he’d found out that he didn’t have to, it would have been a vast relief. And it had been, for those moments before he’d learned about the fonon separation. So why is Asch _not_ relieved? “That’s not —”

How does he explain that he was sort-of talked into it by a variety of political figures? That what Luke wanted for himself _had_ to be set down? That he couldn’t have been talked into it in the first place if he didn’t already think it was unfair of him to take Asch’s place in the world? Any part of that is probably just going to make him sound weak-willed, which will wind up in Asch either lecturing or yelling about how Luke can’t decide anything for himself.

“It isn’t that I wanted to die,” Luke says finally, low and unhappy and hoping desperately not to say the wrong thing.

“You picked the wrong opportunity for that, _dreck_ ,” Asch snaps back before Luke can actually finish his thought.

“ _Hey_ ,” Luke says, bristling and defensive. “Would you _let me finish.”_

Improbably, that works. Asch goes quiet at least for now, eyes glittering oddly as he watches Luke. In the interests of not wasting this opportunity for Asch to possibly actually listen, Luke takes a breath and marshals his thoughts. He’ll have one chance. If that.

Okay. “It’s just,” Luke says. He hesitates under the weight of that gaze, even though he means not to. “It wasn’t right. Even if I didn’t know, I still… I’m the reason you couldn’t go back to your family.” A breath. Asch still looks like he’s listening, even if his eyes are narrower. “ _Our_ family,” Luke corrects, because that’s at least half the point he’s trying to make. “It isn’t fair that Ma — that Van could take everything from you and then you’d just have to die like that, without ever…” Wait, no, Asch said to shut up about Natalia. Luke’s taking him seriously about that, at least for now. “And even if — no. Even though we _both_ have the right to live, to be who we are, if one of us _had_ to die then it should have been me. I owe you that much.”

Asch nods, slow and judicious. Solemn. Understanding. And, with barely another motion to indicate it’s coming, he punches Luke in the face.

“I was _already dying_ ,” Asch roars as Luke is reeling. It seems to come from somewhere deep in him, raw and hurting. He snags Luke by the collar and shakes him once, hard. “Did you miss that the _first_ time I told you? What did you _think_ was going to happen? That I would just waste away happily at Natalia’s side?!”

Does Asch have to take everything exactly the worst way possible? Luke wraps his hands around Asch’s wrists, not sure if it’s to keep him there or stop him. “That’s not _it_ ,” Luke says, frowning, and discovers he’s actually angry. Properly angry, the sort that fizzes in his chest and makes him want to _do_ something. “Are you even listening? You could have looked for a cure, or — or done whatever you wanted. Even if it only wound up being for a little while, you would have your _life_ back —”

Asch’s face twists up, but he’s prevented from letting go of Luke by Luke’s own grip. He settles for shaking him again. Luke’s teeth clack together with the force of it. “ _Where do you get off?_ Asch demands. Another shake, as though that’s going to get answers out of Luke. Luke himself wouldn’t mind some answers, like what the hell Asch is thinking. All he can do right now is tighten his grip on Asch’s wrists and clench his jaw, stubborn. “You don’t have the _right_ to give that back to me. It’s _my_ life, you piece of trash, it isn’t yours to give. _My_ life. _My_ death.”

Oh, Luke thinks numbly. He can’t do anything about that. It’s a helplessness like having Asch’s body in his arms all over again, a sense like being lost so thick Luke swears it fills the air between them. Asch doesn’t _want_ to be helped, and if that’s the case then Luke can’t do… anything. Can he?

Is this Asch’s helplessness, too?

Luke loosens his hold. Asch shoves him aside, watches uncaring as Luke stumbles back and sinks to the ground. Luke doesn’t bother trying to get up, only watches Asch stalk off as far as the nothing-space will let him.

Could Asch feel helpless? Luke chews over that thought, since it’s better than just sitting there in confusion. Asch talked about his life and death like… like they’re the only things he has. Like he’d fight to the end to keep his right to those things. So maybe it’s that Asch wants to control what happens to him, even if it’s bad.

Thinking about it that way puts Luke in mind of his life in Baticul before Tear had come to the manor, when he’d been trapped and resenting it, resenting everything and everyone but the people who offered him some little bit of freedom. Some little bit of _choice_.

He and Asch really are the same, aren’t they. Damn it. Luke draws his knees up to his chest and rests his chin on them, watching Asch’s dark form pace back and forth in the distance. It’s funny, but Asch is already walking less like he’s injured. Either Lorelei’s healing him really fast, or… maybe this place isn’t completely physical? There’s that weird sense about emotions, too, like sometimes the strong ones exist between Luke and Asch rather than staying inside their hearts where emotions belong.

Luke doesn’t know what it all means, though, only that it’s weird and not normal. And he probably couldn’t do anything about it even if he did know what it meant. Instead Luke puts that away and returns to the problem of Asch. Asch, who wants choice, even if it’s about dying. Probably.

If Luke’s right about that, then what does he do with it?

He passes more than a few minutes chasing _that_ problem in circles, too, until Luke watches the crimson of Asch’s hair flick through the air for at least the fiftieth time and it occurs to him to think what he himself would want. He’s spent so long trying to make it clear that they’re not the same person, that they’re two different people who happen to have the same face and name and origins, that he forgets they _are_ the same. Or they were born the same, anyway; it’s impossible not to see that Asch’s experiences have changed him and not for the better. But the point is, something at the core of them is the same.

How does _Luke_ feel, then?

He seems to have the time to think about it, anyway. Asch is settling down. Sort of. If stripping off remaining pieces of armor with angry jerks can be called settling down. Luke listens to the clank of metal and watches and thinks.

Luke remembers he’d hated not having choices. Hated feeling like his life was being run by someone else. It chafed like literal chains, til some days he didn’t even feel right in his own skin, until he wanted to claw at his face and scream because nothing was right but there was nothing _else_.

(He’s been told he was hard to teach manners.)

So: Van had made Asch feel like that. And then — maybe everyone else had made Asch feel that way, too. Trying to tell him even where he can and can’t die. As much as the thought of Asch dying makes Luke want to throw up, he tries to push past it, to put himself in Asch’s shoes. Say he was still _stuck_ as he’d been in the manor, even when he’d thought he was going to be free, and then finally something, anything he can make _his_ choice, his own, even if it’s a final way out, and then — even that he’s told he can’t.

Yeah. Okay. Maybe Luke gets it a little.

So that’s the problem. Or one of the problems. There’s bound to be a lot of problems, since this is Asch, but Luke can only deal with the ones he knows about. So he has to let Asch have his choices…?

Even Luke can see the issue with that idea. ‘Letting’ Asch have choices. That’s definitely the wrong way to think about it. Asch has choices, and he can make them, or not make them, as he pleases. That’s the first step, then. Luke makes a mental resolution not to _tell_ Asch to do anything again.

But then what? That’s hardly anything. Luke wants, with a desperate sort of urgency, to make it up to him. So he can _feel_ better.

He’s reminded of Jade, of Tear, of some of the harder lessons he had to learn to grow and change. There’s a time and a place for reparations. Sometimes no matter how much you apologize, you can’t make it better. You just have to keep going, and try to do better for yourself, and carry the weight, all along the way.

Luke already knew apologizing to Asch alone won’t help, though. He wishes for someone wiser, but he and Asch are all that’s here.

All that’s here…

Huh. Luke gets to his feet, pulling on that thread of an idea carefully to let it grow, and heads over to where Asch is. From where he is that looks like meters distant, but it takes almost no time at all to be over by the pile of armor and Asch, grumpy in black underclothes still showing slits where swords had pierced him.

“What?” Asch demands.

Well, that’s promising. “Do you want to be called Luke again?” he asks, charging on ahead before he can think better of it.

“What,” Asch says again, still flat, but at least not jumping straight to anger.

“Well,” Luke says. “I mean. There’s no one else here to get confused. And you’re just going to be calling me ‘replica’ or ‘idiot’ anyway. There’s no reason for you to have to be one or the other, so what do _you_ want?”

In silence, Asch eyes Luke like he suspects a trap. Or like a liger who’s not sure if this is something to be snarled at or not. “What is _wrong_ with you,” Asch says finally, lacking most of his normal force. “You’re pathetic.”

But, Luke notes, Asch called him neither a replica nor an idiot. “Even if it’s not ‘Luke,’” he says, doing his best to sound reasonable. He doesn’t move out of arm’s reach, even though he’s pretty sure there’s a good chance of getting punched again. “But it was M — Van who called you ‘Asch,’ right? So if there’s something else you want to be called, I’ll use that.”

Asch stares at him for a long time. “Go away, replica,” he says tiredly, and kicks the pile of armor with a resounding clatter as he turns away.

Luke opts, for once, not to push his luck. It’s not like Asch can entirely run away, here. So Luke backs off several paces, which is close enough to going away in this time and place. He doesn’t know how long he’s expected to stay away, but he’s also definitely not about to ask.

Instead Luke watches Asch some more and tries not to be too obvious about it.

It gets kind of boring. If Luke had his journal, at least he could write about what’s been happening, and maybe figure a few more things out in doing so, but that, like everything else, is in the bags that either went with Anise or sunk with Eldrant. All that’s here, still, is Luke and Asch.

Or just Luke, depending how they look at it. Luke stifles a bitter laugh over that. Bitter is Asch’s thing, not his.

For now, Luke stretches. He does as much of a form as he can with no sword— he has artes that can be used with fists alone, anyway, so that’s something. His mind empties a little as he works through familiar stance after familiar stance, surrendering to the physical instead of getting stuck in the mental problems. It takes a bit of adjusting, and he keeps reaching for a sword and missing the weight of it in his hand, but it works.

Until he feels Asch watching him.

Asch grimaces when Luke turns and catches his eyes, but he doesn’t say anything at first. Luke, for his part, had mostly been expecting his form to be criticized, but… there’s nothing like that.

“Luke,” Asch says finally, slow and reluctant.

“Huh?” Did Asch decide to stop calling him ‘replica,’ or —

“You asked what I wanted to be called.” This is faster, sharper. More like Asch. “It’s Luke. I’m… Luke.”

Luke can’t help smiling at him, he really can’t. “Yeah,” he agrees. “You’re Luke.”

Asch has gone faintly red in the face, which is probably the only reason he’s not complaining about Luke saying stupid things again.

“…That’s it?” he says eventually, after it becomes clear enough that Luke isn’t going to say anything else about it.

“What else would there be?” Luke wants to know, and then immediately backtracks. “I mean, there’s… a lot of other things to talk about, I guess. But if you say your name is Luke, then that’s it. Right? You’re the one who’d know.”

Asch-who-is-also-Luke gives Luke another deeply suspicious look. “What about you,” he says, proddingly, not really a question.

Luke honestly hasn’t gotten that far. Mostly because he’s been assuming Asch’s tendency to call him names will make it kind of a non-issue. He’s _also_ pretty sure that offering to take ‘Asch’ instead is going to be the worst plan ever, so he… doesn’t do that. Eventually Luke just shrugs. “It doesn’t matter right now. I know who I am, no matter what you want to call me.”

There’s visible hesitation about this, and Luke feels it like an echo, the uncertainty about whether the ground ahead is solid or not. It’s hard to shake, but — he’s pretty sure he’s feeling Asch there, not him. Luke doesn’t have any reason to not want to step forward.

Feeling that doesn’t tell him _why_ Asch is feeling that way, though.

“Tch. Trash is trash,” Asch says finally, lacking enough venom that Luke can tell his heart’s not in it, and he retreats several paces to lurk.

What the hell. Luke’s left staring after him for a few moments, wondering about that. It’s like Asch thinks he _has_ to be mean. Well — Luke. Luke vows to try to make the mental adjustment in name as well as the verbal one.

Anyway, it seems kind of like waiting is the better move right now. Again. That doesn’t chafe any less. Luke would far rather go and sort all this out _now_ , follow Asch — Luke and bother him until what’s really true comes out. But… at the same time, Luke is pretty sure that for any of this, whatever it is, to work, he has to let the other Luke come to him. It has to be _his_ choice.

Which means Luke is stuck waiting and reacting instead of _doing_ something.

_Ugh_. Why can’t he just _talk_ about whatever his problem is.

Luke looks after him for a while longer, and when it’s clear he’s just fooling himself with hope and nothing’s going to happen immediately, he goes back to forms. Maybe he can invent something new. It’s not like there’s anything _else_ to do until Asch — _the other Luke_ comes to some new conclusion.


	2. Chapter 2

Waiting is the _worst_. Luke feels like he’s been spending most of his life waiting, and forms only last him so long. He’s resorted to trying to see if he can actually punch a wall when the other Luke finally comes back over for round two. Or possibly round three.

“You look stupid,” the cranky Luke informs him. Luke might have admitted this when he was first trying to punch the nonexistent wall, but definitely not now that it’s been pointed out. “Why are you doing this?”

Luke points at the blank, featureless space all around them. “There aren’t any walls, but no matter how far you walk, we can’t go too far away from each other. And there’s definitely a floor, so…” He taps his foot on the ground in demonstration. There’s no sound, but there’s solidity. “I wanted to see if there were any other limits.”

The unfriendly look he gets back tells Luke that he has possibly answered the wrong question. Well, whatever, that’s the other Luke’s fault for not specifying. “I don’t care about the _walls_ , dreck,” he snaps. “Why are you —”

The original Luke breaks off there. Luke wonders about that unspoken question, because if he was finishing it, it would probably have been _why are you being nice to me_. He knows it’s childish, but sometimes childish just happens when he’s upset, no matter how hard he tries.

Luke doesn’t say anything.

After a little silence the other Luke draws breath to go on, slow as if it takes real effort. “You’re just planning to roll over and give me your name? How pathetic can you get?”

It’s mean, but Luke finds it easier to let it roll off his shoulders now, when he adds in the truth that the other Luke is still hurting, deeply. Luke can take more than this, especially since it’s partially his fault anyway. “It was yours first,” he points out. “And anyway, there’s no reason we can’t both be Luke. People are named after each other all the time, right? If we were actually twins they might have named _both_ of us Luke.” That’s a weird sort of a thought, and Luke is briefly distracted by trying to figure out if their parents knew about the Score before they chose a name.

Not the point. Luke wrinkles his nose, shakes his head. “A-anyway, I’m not _giving_ you my name. You’re… reintroducing yourself.” Yeah, that sounds better.

The other Luke turns on his heel and paces away, and then just as Luke thinks he’s leaving he comes back again, twice as fast, and grabs Luke by the shoulders. “It doesn’t _work_ like that, dammit —”

“Why _not_?” Luke demands. Maybe there’s something stupid in the noble lessons Luke never got, but this problem is starting to seem really simple to Luke. Words come faster and faster. “Mother would be happy to have two sons. She said so herself! Uncle didn’t want either of us to sacrifice ourselves.” He’s getting carried away with himself; it’s only now that Luke realizes he’s taken the other Luke’s shoulders in exchange. “Even if Father _wasn’t_ sure, he’d listen to them, wouldn’t he? Why _can’t_ you just come home with me? Do you actually _want_ to go back to the Oracle Knights?”

“ _No_ ,” he snarls, and does shake Luke now. “Damn you, it’s not — I wasn’t going to survive, do you understand that? Are you honestly this stupid? I can’t —”

“You can,” Luke interrupts, before the other Luke can get too far into insulting him, into saying the same things over and over. “You _can,_ if that’s what you want —”

“I don’t know _how!”_ Words tear raw out of him. He tries to cast Luke away in the wake of that horrible vulnerability but Luke has a hold of him still, and refuses to let go.

That doesn’t mean he knows what to say to that. Silence reigns. Luke swears he can hear both their heartbeats, pounding with exactly how much the other Luke hadn’t meant to say that, how — afraid he is?

Luke is afraid?

Maybe his own expression shifts too far toward pity. The other Luke flinches violently, breaking whatever spell was binding them together, and he tries once more to pull away. Luke makes a split-second decision and again doesn’t let him, not when he’s so close to getting at the heart of things.

_“Damn_ you,” the other Luke says again, heartfelt and desperate, and he shifts his weight with sudden precision to kick where Luke’s stance is open.

Luke is ready enough for some kind of fight that he can block a kick, but the elder Luke changes his motion and hooks his leg instead. Luke’s knee bends without his permission, and he’s on the verge of toppling, almost lets go. They balance on a knife-edge for a moment or two, the other Luke’s face twisted with pain, put in sharp relief this close.

Thought flees. Luke takes a breath and stops fighting the fall, but pulls as he does, and they both go tumbling down in one long awkward sprawl. There are flashes of Luke’s white coat against the other’s black clothes, and the mess of crimson that spills between them is mercifully all the other Luke’s tangling hair, not the blood it could have been.

They wrestle. Every time it seems like the other Luke will free himself entirely, Luke redoubles his efforts, hanging on by fingernails and stubbornness alone. He isn’t invested in winning, not really, not exactly — just getting the other Luke to _talk to him_. And if that needs being angry, then okay, it’s not like it’s hard for him to be angry at Luke.

He’s on top briefly, then he’s flipped again. They roll over each other and it’s hard to tell, in this place, which way is up and down. Luke grunts with the effort of rolling them over again, and then abruptly all the air goes out of him as the other Luke sits on him. He keeps trying anyway, but as Luke half-lunges up to get a hold of him, the other Luke catches his wrists and slams his hands down over his head, teeth bared with a savage satisfaction.

Luke tests the grip, finds it like iron. He lifts his hips instead, pushing up with his legs to see if he can unseat the other Luke. It doesn’t quite work like he hopes, but at least the other Luke has to fight to stay in control.

“Stay _down_ ,” he hisses, and then Luke isn’t quite sure what happens, but it sounds like he’s fighting to catch his breath, there’s that wheeze from back when they first woke here, and his hands on Luke’s weaken a little.

He’s still injured and he’s still fighting. Luke had thought — He tries to sit up again, this time meaning to help, but even gasping the other Luke shoves him back down. “You’re still hurt,” Luke protests.

“ _Why_ ,” the original demands, between gasps. “Why do you _care_.”

The moment crystallizes. Luke flexes his fingers and it feels like the largest motion he’s ever made. It’s too hard to condense all the confusing mess of compassion and hope and homesickness and want into actual words.

— except. Wait. Maybe he doesn’t have to. Luke catches his breath, chews on his lip. “Can I show you?” he asks finally, hopefully. It seems rude, now that he actually thinks about it, to just shove emotions at people. “Like before. Just — gentler.”

Luke stares at Luke like one of them is actually from space and he isn’t convinced about which one of them it is. Finally, grudgingly, breath still hitching, the original Luke nods. He doesn’t bother to let Luke up.

All right. Luke takes a deep breath. Almost out of sympathy, almost as if that’ll help the other Luke breathe properly. Then he does nearly what he did the first time. This time he thinks about the other Luke carefully, slowly, works through the feelings he has about him. There’s the mess of desperation to help without knowing how, clawing up inside him; there’s the urgent need to make things right even though he knows it isn’t really his fault, because _no one else will_ ; there’s the bubbling fury at how unfair everything that had been done to the original Luke was. There’s so _much_ , Luke finds, now that he’s bringing it up on purpose, not just as side-effect of conversation or discovery. It’s hardly about pity, it’s about how the other Luke, as a person, deserves better. Even if Luke _wasn’t_ his replica, he thinks he’d feel this way.

Gently, gently, Luke nudges the edges of this vastness toward the space between them, where something like a link resonates.

He sees the emotions come over the other Luke slow like a sunrise, twisting his face as he tries to control himself. Luke stays flat and limp, not fighting, only watching and offering no contest.

There’s a choked-off sound. The other Luke lets go of his wrists, presses his hands to his own face to cover his eyes. His shoulders curve inward and he’s gasping for breath again, only —

It sounds more like sobs than the alternative. Gingerly Luke tries yet again to get up. And yet again he doesn’t get much of anywhere fast, owing to exactly where the other Luke is sitting, just a little above his hips. He exhales grumpily, settles for nudging the other’s knee with one hand. When he isn’t immediately rebuffed, he upgrades that to resting his hand there instead of nudging.

The other Luke twitches, but ultimately does nothing about it. As a gesture of comfort, it’s not much, but at least it’s something.

Luke still doesn’t like just laying here, but right now he doesn’t really have another choice.

_You’re unbelievable_ , finally echoes in his head, rich with incredulity and resonating faintly in the way his voice always does. _I still hate you_.

“I know.” Luke tries wiggling free. After some hesitation, the other Luke lets him. Luke doesn’t wind up going far, though. He thinks about what to do for a bit once he can sit up, and in the end just scoots over to be next to the other Luke, nudging their shoulders together in compromise. To say _I’m here_ without being inescapable or even obvious.

Silence starts to stretch out again. Luke minds it a little less this time. He’s not really expecting anything else from the other Luke. And there isn’t anything forthcoming, but when the other Luke finally straightens up and takes his hands from his face, he doesn’t lean away, either.

… His hair’s a mess.

“You’re still hurt,” Luke says finally, pulling himself away from weird details to remember where they were a few minutes ago. “I thought —”

“Swords in your lungs don’t heal _that_ fast,” the other Luke says, bitter and precise. “Even with healing artes. …These aren’t our real bodies.”

“Huh?”

There’s an aggrieved sigh, but for once the other Luke tries explaining a bit more. “I’m not injured here any more, but I can still _feel_ it.”

He presses a hand to his chest, fingers spanning between two of the splits in his clothes. Luke swallows hard when he really takes in that each one of those tears marks where a sword went through Asch. There are too many of them.

At least where fabric shifts there’s only skin, no blood. The other Luke promptly ruins this. “There’s still blood in my lungs. It’s healing. I — think it’s healing.”

He goes quiet again, as though to consider this.

Luke shifts from side to side, containing questions within motion until he can’t any more. “So we’re together because we’re linked and inside Lorelei. And — I was holding you.” His body, anyway. Maybe that has an effect, maybe not. Still, it’s something the other Luke might not have known. “If this is only fonons, what are we?”

“‘Only’ fonons.” The other Luke scoffs. “It’s the seventh fonon, inside the _aggregate sentience_ of that fonon. Or — at least some portion of it.” He sounds utterly disgusted about the next part. “We’re… ugh. Souls.”

Souls who can punch each other in the face. Trying to wrap his mind around that is kind of making Luke’s head hurt.

“Are we in the fon belt?” he wants to know.

“Idiot,” the other Luke says, not entirely unkindly. “How am I supposed to know? You released Lorelei, and we’re surrounded by enough of the seventh fonon that it has to be involved one way or another. That’s all I know.”

It’s not very helpful at _all_.

“But you’re healing,” Luke says aloud, going back to something he _can_ understand more clearly. “And you can tell that for sure, even from here. So we’re not _not_ in our bodies either. Or at least we’re still connected to them, which means we’re both definitely alive.”

Slowly, assessingly, the other Luke nods. It seems like it pains him to agree with Luke. “Almost certainly.”

Not really in their bodies, and the other Luke can feel his injuries healing… “I guess we’re here till you’re better, then,” Luke concludes. At least he’s not alone. This would have been very boring alone, for either of them. “I wonder how long that’ll take.”

The other Luke gives him a deeply dubious look. “If it’s only until I’m better, what the hell are you doing here?”

Luke shrugs. “Well, like I said, we were together. At the end. I don’t know how much time it’d take to fix fonon separation, but it’s probably less work than…” Multiple impalings in the lungs and Luke’s just not going to talk about that. “…Anyway, I don’t know why else we’d both be here. And I don’t mind waiting for you, so…”

He realizes it’s true as he says it. It’s only fair, really, after the years lost, traded between them. His friends, and especially Tear, will know he means to keep his promise. Even if it takes a little longer. The original Luke is worth it. “Since this has to involve Lorelei somehow, it probably knows that, right?”

“What is _wrong_ with you,” the other Luke mutters, shaking his head. There’s enough things he could be referring to that Luke just doesn’t answer him. It doesn’t sound as bitter and angry as things like that usually do from him.

And he’s still sitting here, with Luke. He hasn’t moved away yet. The place where their shoulders touch seems like the biggest thing in the world.

The quiet, though, might drive Luke mad before the other Luke does. The other seems content — well, as content as he ever gets — to just sit with eyes half-closed and look at nothing in particular. Luke bites his tongue to keep himself from cutting in with something, anything at all to make the silence less. There’s so _much_ to be said, now that they have the time and space. Now that nothing’s collapsing and no one is dying and — well, now that the other Luke can’t just yell at Luke and run off like he usually does.

Luke will admit he’s grateful for that.

The other Luke’s breathing has evened out to something more peaceful by the time Luke honestly can’t take just _sitting_ any more. At least he’s narrowed his list of dumb questions down to the ones that are most important. “Why didn’t you come back?”

The sudden shift in the other Luke’s bearing is unmistakably dangerous. Luke clarifies carefully. “I don’t know what happened back then, not really,” he says. “You were kidnapped, and they made me from you and left me in Choral Castle to be found instead. I know that much. But… didn’t you want to go back? You could have proved who you were — I didn’t know anything when I was that young, it would have been easy. Did Van have you locked up, or —” No, that doesn’t make sense. The other Luke spoke of Van like he was his master, too. There was a time when they’d both believed in Van. If Van had imprisoned him, that wouldn’t make sense. “— Did you know about me? Did you think Mother and Father wouldn’t miss you?”

For the most part, the other Luke lets the careful-stringing together of questions happen. Then Luke stops being careful, and the other Luke goes rigid. “ _Don’t_ ,” he says, low and menacing. “I _did_ go back. Don’t talk about —” And then something lapses in the other Luke, and he goes distant, as if he’s just forgetting to snap. Luke holds his breath.

“…Van let me go,” the other Luke says, some time later. “I thought I’d escaped, but he let me go. I made my way back to Baticul on my own.” Some feeling ghosts over Luke, a gnawing hunger and desperate loneliness, a memory there and gone again. There’s a sick feeling of his own in the pit of his stomach. “I _saw_ you. Out in the courtyard, with Mother and Guy and — no one missed me. They had to teach you how to _walk_ and they couldn’t even tell you weren’t me. They weren’t _looking_ any more.”

He doesn’t sound angry any longer, only low and dull and tired, and that’s way worse. Luke draws his knees up to his chest and rests his chin on them, wishing he could get away with hugging the other Luke. Anything to help that emptiness. Luke’s getting the shadow of it, a dull ache of a gap that nothing will ever fit into, and he doesn’t know how the other Luke bears it. It’s not _fair._

“They were always looking for you,” he says finally, very quietly. He can see that same courtyard, both freedom and cage. “Every time I didn’t know something, or didn’t remember what to call someone, or — there was a month where Natalia asked me every day about the promise you made her. Mother was the nicest about it, but they were always looking for you. They just thought I was… hiding you, sort of.”

Fomicry had been abandoned and forbidden. No one would have thought of a replica replacement as a likely possibility. Except maybe Jade, and he was in Malkuth busy being the Necromancer. “It’s not the same thing,” Luke hastens to add. “I know it doesn’t compare.” All things told, his life in the manor, for all that he was trapped, could have been a lot worse. He doesn’t know what the other Luke has gone through, only that it’s made him someone like this. Sharp-edged. “But they didn’t just forget you. Not like that.”

“You’re seven years too late, replica.” The other Luke’s tone rasps downward ominously. “Do you think it makes a difference now?”

Luke actually kind of does. “It means there’s a place for you,” he says stubbornly. “There always was, and there’s always going to be. Even if you don’t want it, it’s there.”

“When are you going to stop harping on about that?”

“When you understand it,” Luke says. He’d like to say he’ll keep on bothering until the other Luke actually comes home with him, but it has to be his choice. “— And not just saying you do to get me to shut up, either.”

The grumpy sigh from off to Luke’s side tells him that option was definitely next on the other Luke’s list.

“I want you to come home,” Luke presses on, not looking at the other Luke. He tilts his head back to look up instead. If he imagines hard enough, he can almost see blue sky. He misses it already. “I’m not the only one. I’m not going to _stop_ wanting you to come home. But I can’t make you, so all I can do is keep telling you.”

“ _Why,”_ the other Luke demands, and then there’s a hand on Luke’s shoulder and he’s pulled to face the other Luke. He’s getting used to being hauled around by his shoulders. “You don’t make any sense. If you were this soft, you’d never have gotten this far, but you keep — acting like you _care_.”

“It isn’t an act,” Luke says, injured. And the other Luke should know that, given the conversation before this one. “Is it that strange to think there’s room for both of us?”

The vast silence says that yes, it is, that from the moment the other Luke saw his replacement with his family that he never once thought there could be a chance for the two of them to live peacefully.

When the other Luke finally breaks the silence, Luke twitches faintly in surprise. He was expecting to have to do it himself. “You never met the original Fon Master,” the other Luke is saying as he lets go, going back to not looking at Luke. “He had himself replicated because he knew he was dying anyway. All of his replicas knew why they were created and what their job was, once they could understand it. Most of them were useless.”

He stops talking there, like that’s supposed to explain something. It probably does to him.

Luke thinks about Ion — about the replicas of Ion he knew. Ion, who was one of the kindest people he’d ever met, and Sync, who had been as consumed by bitterness as Ion was by compassion. Florian is probably too new to count, but even Ion _knew_ he was a replica of Ion, and had never talked about it, even to the closest people who might have a right to know…

Oh. Maybe that’s it, then. If all the other replicas the other Luke had known _did_ know, then he probably thought Luke did too. Luke shakes his head in denial. He’d be more pleased to have followed the other Luke’s line of thinking if it wasn’t such a sad one. “I didn’t know,” he says. “Sometimes I think everyone else knew before I did.”

The other Luke snorts, derisive. “It’s almost insulting that someone so dense was made from _me_.”

“H-hey.” Luke flushes hot. It might be a step above where he was before, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. Part of it is his own doing, for not paying as much attention to his lessons as he could, but the teachers are just as much to blame. “It’s not my fault everyone was trying to _remind_ me of things instead of _teach_ me.”

“It’s not my fault,” the other Luke mimics, and it’s caustic, the way he says it. Luke flinches at the uncomfortable mirror. Said like that it takes him back to the Tartarus, and the uncomfortable days under the Qliphoth’s yawning abyssal ‘sky.’ “Nothing’s your fault, is it.”

Akzeriuth sits like a stone inside Luke. “Not knowing I was a replica isn’t my fault,” Luke says when he can speak around it. “What Ma — what Van did isn’t my fault. Akzeriuth _is_ my fault. I know that.” His shoulders curve in, and he pulls his knees up again. He’s going to carry it the rest of his life, he knows. It’s a good thing he’ll be living longer than he thought.

The other Luke doesn't say anything about this, which somehow only makes Luke feel smaller.

Eventually he just gets up. Luke listens carefully, but there’s no sign of the short, catching breaths from earlier. The other Luke stretches out gingerly, then eyes Luke, narrow and judging.

“You’re pathetic,” he says finally, under his breath, and stalks behind and past Luke, off into the not-quite distance. Something brushes Luke’s hair as he passes.

…Which definitely has to be an accident, right?

Luke doesn’t dare examine that thought too closely. He misses the other Luke’s presence beside him. When it comes clear that the other Luke isn’t going to immediately come back this way, Luke uncurls and lets himself fall over backward, dropping his head the last couple of inches to hit the floor. It doesn’t hurt like it would on a normal solid surface. He should probably thank Lorelei for that one.

The colorless space above stretches on and on and on. Luke raises one hand toward it, fingers star-spread, and wonders about the sky. It’s going to be very boring if they keep having to have these huge breaks in their conversations. He’s still hopeful that he and the other Luke will come to understand each other better, but in the mean time it’s _boring_.

The other Luke doesn’t do anything immediately. A sit-up and a craned neck reveal that he’s at some kind of stand-off with his discarded armor. Which is, at least right now, only his business. Luke flops down again and lets his mind wander.

Since the other Luke brought it up, Luke keeps thinking of that same courtyard, back on the estate in Baticul. It had been his closest thing to freedom, until Tear happened. It’s always going to be colored with memories of Van now, probably. But there’s also always been Pere and Guy and all the other servants and the gardens…

Luke daydreams of the home he wants them both to return to, til he swears he can see the sky and the drifting clouds, smell the particular roses Mother always had Pere plant. It’s a way to pass the time, at least, but it might be making the homesickness worse.

He’d thought he wasn’t going to get to go home. Now the hope is impossible to contain.

“Hey, replica.” The other Luke leans into view, scowling, blocking out light. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything,” Luke protests, pushing himself up on his elbows. “I was just thinking —”

“Well, stop.” The other Luke gestures expansively, indicating their surroundings. Luke looks, ready with something cranky about being told to stop thinking, and as soon as he sees what the other Luke means he forgets it all.

He isn’t imagining the sky. Fuzzily, their lack-of-place has taken on the suggestion of planter boxes and stone tile and wide sky above. Luke’s eyes go wide. “It — _changed_?”

“Congratulations,” the original Luke says sarcastically. “You can see.”

“How is that possible?” Luke sits up properly, looking around some more as the other Luke takes a step back from him. Their surroundings look wavery, like one of the mirages out in the Zao desert.

“Memory particles could be reacting to us...”

Luke hears some hesitation. “You don’t know what this is either,” he says, more confidently than he feels, and goes to see if those planter boxes are an illusion or not. Ha. They’re on equally confused footing here. “It might not even be real. I was thinking of home…”

The plants and the box they’re planted in prove to be three-dimensional, but not quite real. Luke touches a fuzzy-edged leaf and his finger sinks halfway through it with a feeling like scraping his nails down tree bark. He takes his hand back in a hurry.

“Memories,” the other Luke says, low and thoughtful. He’s come over while Luke wasn’t looking, and for a moment the two of them regard the non-existent plants with their own versions of careful consideration. “…You never paid all that much attention to the details of these, did you. Think of something you _do_ remember.”

“Like _what_ ,” Luke says, grumpy response both to the order and to being put on the spot. But nevertheless he thinks of the day when everything changed — he could hardly forget what it sounded like, the first hints of Tear’s clear voice rolling sleep through the manor—

_Toue rei zue kuroa ryuo toue zue…_

Luke starts, looking around for her with a sudden sharp burst of hope. Beside him the other Luke does almost the same, except that he’s reaching for a sword that isn’t there and grimacing.

There’s nothing there. No one. Only the song, echoing, and the sense of breathless anticipation hanging between them. “Well,” the other Luke says dryly, straightening when Tear fails to appear. “That answers that question. Stop hoping for a rescue, idiot, it’s distracting.”

He’ll hope as much as he wants, thanks. “What do we do with it?” Luke wants to know instead, resorting to asking the more knowledgeable person in the room. It’s cool that they can do stuff like this out of memories, he guesses, and it’ll probably make things less boring, but… there’s probably stuff the other Luke wouldn’t want him to see, too.

It’s lucky it seems to take a lot of thinking.

“‘We’ do nothing.” The other Luke turns away, pacing off again. “Try not to think too hard, replica.”

Kind of ironic, when usually he’s telling Luke to think things through. But Luke notes also that he doesn’t follow up with any easy jab about how not thinking should be easy or whatever. The little absences of insults are kind of nice.

Luke sits down where he is and promptly starts thinking. It’s _general_ thinking, in his defense, not anything about specific memories. That’s probably good enough.

What comes to mind first, anyway, is that they can change their surroundings on purpose, but it has to be stuff they know well. Maybe, and Luke is guessing here, but maybe things with emotions attached will happen better. Like Tear. Or the sound of Tear, at least. Luke doesn’t know about _Tear_ -Tear yet, and probably shouldn’t try to find out.

It’s not too far a leap to think maybe they could use it to show each other things. Mostly Luke thinks of this because he _heard_ Tear’s fonic hymn, loud and clear and almost real, and that was just a fraction of a memory. The principle of that should apply to everything else, right?

He might also be making all of this up. And there’s no real way to tell if any of this is possible or not except to try, and the other Luke _specifically_ told him not to think too hard about it.

Or. At least to _try_ not to think too hard, but Luke is pretty sure he can’t get away with _I didn’t mean to_.

So. If he’s going to experiment with this whatever-it-is, he has to make it worth the other Luke probably being angry with him again, and he has to make it something that won’t rub in what Luke had and his original didn’t. That’s… probably not a lot.

And what would he do with it if he _does_ find they can show each other memories like this? It’s a bit above and beyond the call of defeating boredom, and Luke is still guessing the other Luke won’t have anything he wants Luke to see. Is there anything Luke would want to show him?

There is and isn’t, really. Luke thinks about childhood memories and honestly can’t tell if sharing the time with Natalia and Mother and Father would be cruel or consolation. And since he can’t tell, he’s not going to make the offer.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Luke says aloud, having gotten absolutely nowhere, and he frowns at the remains of the planter box, now barely more than a suggestion of dirt and scent.

“What _now_?”

Oops. “Nothing,” Luke says quickly, and then scrambles mentally for something that he could actually have been thinking about, because in no way is the other Luke going to take ‘nothing’ as a reasonable answer.

“What are you doing,” the other Luke says, flat and unimpressed. He doesn’t come over, but Luke can see from here how he’s turned back to give Luke a suspicious look.

“ _Nothing_ ,” Luke insists. “I was just — wondering.” The look that follows makes it clear to him this is still insufficient, and Luke sighs. All he’s been able to come up with is _also_ a bad idea. “What was Van like, before? You believed in him once.”

“Van,” the other Luke begins, with an exacting sort of bite in his words, “was a skilled manipulator, and nothing more.”

Luke kind of thinks there’s more in what the other Luke isn’t saying.

“Wasn’t he nice to you, if he needed your help?” Luke wonders aloud.

“Why do you want to know about Van?”

“Because I _don’t_ know,” Luke says. “Once he had what he wanted, he didn’t need me any more.” He doesn’t know if the other Luke ever felt that way. Disposable. Maybe he did. There was a replacement for him, after all. “But he wasn’t always that way. Tear and Guy said so, too. Unless…”

Maybe it isn’t so much that Hod had changed him, as it is that Van had always had the same capability for — the things he’d done — and it was just that the destruction of Hod meant he had no reason _not_ to be that way.

“There’s no point in wondering,” the other Luke says. Despite that, he does move back toward Luke, closing the distance at a slow, measured pace. “He’s dead. What happened, happened. You’re never going to get whatever answers you’re looking for.”

Luke shakes his head. “That’s not true. I mean — not necessarily. You can learn about people from everyone who knew them. Their family, their friends —”

“Friends,” the other Luke repeats, slipping back into that low, dangerous tone of voice. “You think he and I were _friends_.”

“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” Luke says, letting his frustration out in a snap like he’s been trying not to. “Why do you always have to assume the worst possible thing? It’s like you _want_ to be angry.”

As if to be contrary, the other Luke doesn’t then yell. “What _did_ you mean, then?” he demands roughly.

Luke keeps getting these second chances somehow, though he’s definitely done nothing to deserve them. It’s lucky, though; he doesn’t seem to be able to get any of this right the first time. “I just meant — you were close to him. So you saw different things. The Van you knew and the Van I know could have been entirely different people.”

There’s a silence. It looks, before the other Luke turns away, like he’s trying to control himself and failing. Luke thinks the space around them starts to shade toward the dull stone of Daath, just for a moment or two.

“Van needed me to remain compliant,” the other Luke finally says, bitterly. “It’s easier to get someone to do what you want when they _want_ to be there. So he was — _nice_. To an extent. But a carrot hardly does any good without a stick.”

All over again Luke feels icy, dreading. “W — what did he do?” he asks, because he feels it’s wrong to just say he doesn’t want to know; because as much as he’s not sure if he _does_ want to know, he’s not about to pretend he can look away, either.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” the other Luke says. Irritable sounds much better on him than bitter. All the same, Luke tries to rearrange his face as ordered. “It wasn’t whatever sordid thing you’re imagining. After I came back from Baticul I wasn’t about to try to escape, so it’s not like he kept me chained in a dungeon or something. I was part of the Oracle Knights, and trained as befitted that.”

Luke’s having some trouble figuring out where the stick in that equation is. Maybe he doesn’t understand the normal meaning of the saying. “You keep going back and forth,” he says finally. “You wanted to be with Van, you believed in him, but earlier you said he — needed you to comply?”

That doesn’t fit. Though Luke guesses he can understand the desire to please Master Van, even after his true colors had been revealed.

“And?” The other Luke’s voice dips dangerously again. Luke’s starting to get used to that; it’s not quite the threat it used to be. “What’s your point?”

What _is_ Luke’s point? He gives that a little thought too, but not so much as to let the other Luke think he’s not going to answer. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough time to hit an actual conclusion. “I’m not sure,” he says out loud. “I sort of understand, maybe, but I don’t think it’s the same as how he was with me. Do _you_ know how you feel about him?”

The other Luke snarls something wordless and angry. Luke doesn’t flinch back mostly because he’s already prepared for the other Luke not to be very happy about anywhere this conversation is going. There’s still some space between them, anyway, though the other Luke has turned to pace over the same patch of ground again and again, like he’s going to wear a hole in it.

Luke keeps seeing Daath’s dull stone. If he wasn’t imagining the blue skies earlier, he’s probably not imagining this either. Does he push or let it go? Are they going to get anywhere if he doesn’t push? _Can_ the other Luke be persuaded without yelling and anger being involved?

“I know how I feel,” the other Luke says finally, stopping where he is and turning on his heel back to face Luke. He sounds decisive, oddly enough. And less angry than Luke has definitely been expecting. “I don’t think you want to know.”

“Yes,” Luke says, contradicting him immediately. “Yes, I do. I’m asking, aren’t I?”

The other Luke’s lip curls. And then Luke starts _feeling_ things. A yearning inside, reaching for Master Van’s approval; he wants it because the alternative is cold and lonely and sharp; he _believes_ this is the best and only course of action but — it isn’t, he knows it isn’t, not underneath everything where the memory of Natalia and a promise to change things sits, the only warm ember inside all this cold —

He doesn’t trust Van. But he believes, because the alternative is worse. Luke shivers with the weight of all this cold, the sense of being apart and having nothing but _to_ believe. He knows this is the other Luke, feeling this, and just a little Luke can stand outside it and feel the unhappiness about how wrong it is, but he can also see how easy it would be to just… give up everything else and follow, in this chilliness.

He _did_ believe in Van once, after all.

The space around them is beginning to remind Luke of the Oracle Knights’ HQ, between the stone and the slow ebbing of light, and a sense of being enclosed. It’s the sort of atmosphere which makes Luke want to reach out, to be close to someone else if only for the comfort of not being wholly alone in this place.

…Is that him, or the other Luke?

“Happy now?” the other Luke demands, sullen.

“Not really,” Luke says, because who could be happy about all that. Some of the feelings ebb out of them, and it almost seems he can watch them go even while feeling them. “I asked, and I wanted to know, but those feelings aren’t something I can be happy about.”

The other Luke stares back. “You’re going to keep asking, aren’t you.”

Luke nods.

“What is _wrong_ with you,” the other Luke says again, under his breath. He shoves his hair back from his face with a muttered curse; it doesn’t stay where he puts it. “Do you need to have _everything_?”

“That’s not it,” Luke protests, but it’s weaker than it could be, now that he understands better why the other Luke might think something like that. “It’s just —”

It’s either going to take the wind out of the other Luke’s sails or spark louder arguing which might screw things up. Luke hesitates. He can’t usually tell which way things like this will fall.

“Just _what_?”

But he can’t not answer that. “I want to understand you,” Luke says. He’s pretty sure he’s said something to this effect before, but maybe this time the other Luke will listen to it. “How you were with Van, with Natalia — what you went through —” He chews his tongue for a moment to stop himself saying anything _really_ stupid, pulls back and thinks. “A-anyway, it’s not about _having_ things. Memories, or experiences. It’s about knowing how you feel. Or felt.”

The other Luke is looking at him in disbelief, like he can’t figure out how Luke is real. It says something that Luke knows several variations of this look, and he goes faintly hot again. “What?”

“You,” the other Luke says, slow and thoughtful and a little bit sharp. “You want to know how I _feel_.”

Well, when he puts it like that, it sounds a lot more stupid than it did to Luke. “Yes,” he agrees anyway, because that’s the sum of it, taken down to its most essential core. He wants to know the other Luke’s feelings, because he’s well aware there’s more than anger in there, even if the other Luke seems like he wants everyone to believe otherwise. “I’m not going to _make_ you, anyway —”

“Like you could,” the other Luke mutters.

Luke really couldn’t. He nods. “Yeah. So. I’m going to keep asking.”

“Right.” A long, measuring silence that Luke doesn’t dare break. Then: “And what if how I _feel_ is that the last seven years of my life were hell, and I spent most of them hating you for everything you took from me?”

The weirdest thing is that Luke doesn’t quite believe him. It makes sense for the other Luke to hate him, though he’ll admit he’s not sure what he’ll do if that’s actually true. And yet the words _don’t_ ring completely true, even though there’s a certain kind of accustomed venom in them.

“ _Do_ you hate me?” Luke asks finally. Because — the other Luke hasn’t actually said he does, right there. He’s said he does any number of times in the past, and yet: not here, when Luke actually asks. “I’d understand if you did.” Taking the other Luke’s place. Akzeriuth. The Tower of Rem. Everything that’s happened… there are reasons the other Luke could hate him.

But the other Luke is, noticeably, silent.

He’s exhausting. Luke finds he’s tired — tired, and empty, and like there’s nothing left to gain, nothing he can possibly get out of this. He doesn’t know, for a moment, why he’s keeping on, why he keeps putting one foot in front of the other when that’s all he seems to exist to do —

No. That’s not Luke. That’s the other Luke, frowning with shadows under his eyes, and losing hold on his bitterness so it seeps out where Luke can feel it. Luke takes a steadying breath and steps back.

It isn’t hate that he’s feeling. But — Luke suspects that if the other Luke actually _says_ he doesn’t hate him, that’s too close to something like forgiveness.

How does the other Luke keep going, like this?

“Never mind,” Luke says finally, turning his face away. He’s terrible at schooling it to blankness like Tear or Jade, and the other Luke’s only going to see some kind of softness he’ll mistake for pity again. “I guess it’s a stupid question.”

He doesn’t see it, but he hears the other Luke take one step forward and stop. His boots sound like they hit stone. Still Daath, then. Still the cathedral. What is it the other Luke is thinking about so hard that it’s doing this? Or — trying too hard _not_ to think about?

Luke worries.

“I don’t understand _why_ ,” the other Luke says eventually, low and gruff. It sounds like the words are dragged from him. “We don’t _need_ to know more about each other. Why can’t you just be satisfied with how things are?”

Talk about stupid questions. It’s kind of fun to be on this end of things for once.

“You’re not, are you?” Luke points out, looking up again.

The other Luke gives him an unfriendly look. “That doesn’t mean anything. I’m fine.”

“We have the same roots,” Luke says, which is probably the most delicate way he knows how to phrase it. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, watching the other Luke for any sign of a sudden move in turn. “So if you’re not satisfied with something, I’m probably not going to be either.”

The disgusted noise the other Luke makes is surprisingly eloquent for not having words in it. In the end, though, this time it’s the other Luke who looks away first.

“…I don’t know what you expect out of pushing this,” he says. “Training was… training. Van was Van. There isn’t much to tell.”

More dodging, but it’s a step above insults. A step in the right direction. “If there isn’t much to tell, why don’t you want to?” Luke prods.

“Because you’re soft,” the other Luke returns irritably. “Training for _you_ looks like having fun with wood swords out in the courtyard. It wasn’t like that, with the Oracle Knights, because we were trained to be _soldiers_. But if I tell you about that in any detail, you’re going to get the wrong idea again, and start making faces at me again.”

Luke doesn’t make _faces_. Does he?

That’s beside the point, anyway. And he can’t exactly promise not to get the wrong idea, because he’s pretty sure it’s the other Luke who’s the one with the wrong idea about what’s okay and what’s not, but he doesn’t know for sure. Maybe if Tear were here she could tell him what’s normal for soldier training, but even then from the few times Tear’s talked about it, it sounds like Major Legretta was nice to her.

Well. Nice for Legretta, anyway. Luke isn’t entirely clear on what that involves, but it’s probably better than normal Legretta.

There’s the sound of a heel-click on stone that isn’t either of them. The other Luke looks up sharply. “What are you thinking about, replica?”

_Now_ what is it? Luke opens his mouth to answer at least partially and is cut off by the faint but distinctive click of a primed gun. And here he thought Legretta would be a safer thing to admit to thinking about than his various doubts.

Apparently not. The other Luke has a weird look about him, now — kind of flat, closed-off. Luke doesn’t see him like this, not ever. He sees the other Luke yelling or angry or sometimes, very occasionally, a little soft about the idea of Natalia. This is just… like someone turned him off.

Luke doesn’t like it.

The other Luke is looking past him, not at him; Luke turns his head just enough to see what he’s looking at, and —

It’s not Legretta. Not quite. But the suggestion of her is there. The stark black and white of her usual uniform shapes the air, the scent of weapon oil and the hot after-burn of light artes hit Luke’s nose. Involuntarily Luke takes a step back, toward the other Luke, and isn’t even sure immediately why. Just a memory. Is he looking for solidarity, or someone to hide behind?

The other Luke exhales, low and controlled. Luke straightens his posture, automatic just like his step backward. He doesn’t want to be around Legretta. The other Luke doesn’t want to be around her. So why…?

“Stop _thinking_ ,” the other Luke hisses. “That should be easy for you, come on —”

The fact that he’s resorting to insults after so long tells Luke something, too; he’s just not sure _what_.

“ _Again_ ,” says a voice that belongs to neither of them. It’s Legretta’s cool tone, too. Luke looks from the impression of her to the way the other Luke’s face is still tight and blank, and he’s missing something. He’s _missing something_.

When did the other Luke fall into a fighting stance?

_“Mind your footwork_ ,” she says, and the other Luke sighs, exasperated in sound where his expression isn’t. “ _You need to do better if you plan to take up the post the Commandant has in mind for you. Again.”_

A memory. Okay. …Well, no, Luke knew it had to be that. He can’t tell when, though. It kind of sounds like she means before the other Luke was a God-General?

The other Luke still stands fixed. Luke does something even he knows is a little rash, reaches out and tugs at his elbow. At first it’s like stone; then Luke mutters “Come _on_ ,” and the other Luke turns a sharp gaze on him before allowing himself to be pulled further back. It’s the most emotion Luke’s seen in him in the last few minutes.

Where the other Luke was, he’s left an impression in the air like a trail of color, something red and black. The idea of Asch, younger, sword in hand and moving. The shape of the form is more concrete than the people are, really. Luke can see the flicker of the blade inscribing precise shapes, ones he knows, pieces from one of the forms Van taught him.

“ _Again_ ,” Legretta says.

It’s like a broken automaton, Luke thinks; a sort of flickery loop of feeling that keeps happening because it can’t do what it’s supposed to. Some of the ones without enough power in their cores were like that. He looks over at the other Luke again — he’s stuck, too, staring fixed like he can’t look away again. Luke shoves at his shoulder. Nothing.

Nothing until there’s a sudden gunshot, the reverberation of metal. Luke flinches. The sword-flicker of the Asch-impression wavers, draws a wobbly crescent in the air as Asch counters the sudden force.

“ _What was that for_ ,” he demands, and Luke can see the other Luke mouthing the words even though they’re not coming from him. It’s unsettling. He’d like this to stop now. He shoves a little harder, still with no response.

“ _Your grip is slipping. Keep your wrist flexible, you should know this by now.”_

_“I_ was _—!“_

There’s another shot, and memory, original, and replica all flinch in unison at the hot tracery across one arm. There’s a tremor — whose hands is it in? The memory of Asch goes still and flat.

Luke is the only one of them who seems at all surprised or concerned by this. “What the _hell_ ,” he demands, over the blank shadow-Legretta’s inexorable, _“Again_.”

The other Luke doesn’t immediately turn to him, or give him any attention at all. Luke takes this with absolutely no grace, backs up a step, and leaps at the other Luke’s back.

While he knows it’s stupid, it’s also unexpected. The other Luke stumbles forward with a startled, half-swallowed sound; then he regains himself despite Luke’s weight, and the next thing Luke knows he’s being pulled forward, over the other Luke’s head, and slammed down. Some ghost of memory parts in insubstantial color around him and the breath goes out of him, and the next thing Luke knows he’s staring up at the other Luke backed by a light a little brighter than Daath’s depths.

“You wanted to know,” the other Luke says with a faint sneer.

“She _shot_ you,” Luke protests, scrabbling up so he’s at least not looking at the other Luke upside down.

The other Luke rolls his eyes, aggressive in his dismissal. “She was right. I was getting sloppy. This was — before I was appointed God-General. Van couldn’t afford for me not to be up to standard.”

Luke stares blankly even as he’s getting the rest of the way to his feet. He dusts himself off automatically — like there’s dust in this place — and then folds his arms, drawing in and setting himself. “That’s not a very helpful way to train someone.” Something occurs. “Wait, you mean that was _normal_?”

The other Luke reaches over — for a moment Luke thinks he’s about to get cuffed in sheer exasperation, and then something imperceptible shifts, and the other Luke’s intent blunts, and he tugs on Luke’s hair instead. “You’re a soft idiot. God-Generals can’t afford mistakes. Sometimes pain is the only way to correct bad instincts.”

“There had to have been a better way,” Luke protests, swatting at the reaching hand. “Even Tear wouldn’t have _knifed_ me.” Probably.

“It worked,” the other says stiffly. He steps back, and there’s silence for a moment. It seems like he’s trying really hard to be uncaring. It also kind of seems like he’s not quite getting there. “Did you forget what I said about being a soldier? She wasn’t there to be _nice_.”

“She didn’t have to be _nice_ ,” Luke returns hotly. “It’s not about _nice_ — you’ve met Jade, come on, he’s not nice at all. But he never actually hurt me, not like that, not even after Akzeriuth.” Looking back Luke knows, with a painful sort of clarity, that he wasn’t an easy student, especially before he cut his hair, and he knows too that Jade has a tendency to grow impatient, even cruel, when the emotions around him start impeding practical progress, but —

He was the _Necromancer_ and he was, in his way, kinder than the woman whose worst name was _Quick_. Man, what does that say about the God-Generals.

And the weird thing is, Luke knows Tear liked her. Maybe even loved her, as a mentor, for the time they had. It’s taking a lot of doing to put these two views together. How could one person be so different? Well — maybe. Luke knows Van had been someone different to him, and to the other Luke, and yet again someone else to Guy, to Tear. He guesses it could be like that. Still…

“ _Stop thinking about her_ ,” the other Luke snarls.

Luke startles, flinches, looking up with eyes wide. It’s still Daath-like around them, though the impressions and shades that belong to any people memories have faded back into fonons. He doesn’t _think_ there’s anything lingering. Probably.

But the other Luke doesn’t look happy with him. And — maybe, Luke thinks, he’s less okay than he’s pretending. He hasn’t answered the rest of what Luke said.

He thinks about that, too, and for once doesn’t push it, not with that half-wild look on the other Luke’s face. It’s better than the terribly blank look of earlier, and Luke can ask later.

“What am I supposed to think about, then?” he wants to know. It’s sort of an invitation. Maybe — if there’s something the other Luke wants to know about, or something he wants to see, then Luke doesn’t mind. It’s not like the other Luke can think all that much less of him.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“You’re the one telling me not to think about things,” Luke points out. “If you’re going to do _that_ , you should at least tell me what you _do_ want me to think about.”

“Make something up,” the other Luke snaps, and then, a bare half-breath later, “Fine. Natalia. Since you couldn’t _shut up_ about her earlier —”

Luke has the feeling it’s a little bit more than that, but it’s only a feeling. Half the art of a conversation with the other Luke is knowing when to push and when not to, and that alone is harder than figuring out if Jade’s having an emotion or not, since the other Luke’s reaction is almost always some kind of unhappy. It’s just that earlier the other Luke couldn’t wait for him to stop talking about Natalia, and the fact that now he’s asking…

It means something. Luke just isn’t sure what.

The other Luke eyes him. Luke tries to think about Natalia.

She’s not that hard to bring to mind, at least, even if he’s not precisely sure what part to think about. Natalia’s been part of his life basically forever. Always and always, ever since she started trying to help him remember. She was there when he was barely even sure who he was.

Their surroundings are still resolutely Daath’s stone. Maybe a bit paler. The tension between them isn’t really getting any lighter, but at least it’s not getting worse.

New approach. Daath. When was Natalia in Daath? Well, plenty of times, obviously, they were in and out of the cathedral and the Oracle Knights’ headquarters almost more times than Luke can count; but most obvious to him is the time when Natalia and Ion had been kidnapped. The surroundings are close to that now, too. Close stone, dull repetitive hallways and doors, the weight of all the stone heavy above them. And Natalia had been there, in one identical room, waiting for him. Expecting him to be the Luke she was looking for, but waiting nevertheless.

Now that Luke is thinking about it, paying attention to the way the room _feels_ rather than just what it looks like, there’s definitely some change. It’s a little warmer, and the closeness is more comforting than oppressive, and Luke darts a quick sideways glance at the other Luke to find that he looks just a little less stiff.

Natalia does that sometimes. At least, she has in the few times Luke’s seen her and the other Luke together. It’ll probably keep happening. Maybe that’s why the other Luke isn’t sure if he wants to hear about her or not.

“You said,” the other Luke starts, and cuts himself off abruptly. The surroundings haven’t changed much more.

Luke waits for more to follow that. It doesn’t. He thinks of home and Natalia and anything _but_ Daath, and he takes several full breaths before he goes ahead and prods at the other Luke’s half-finished sentence anyway. “I’ve been saying a lot of things,” he says. “What are you talking about?”

The other Luke gives him another suspicious look, which is terribly familiar both from him and from the mirror. Silence.

“…About Natalia,” the other Luke says eventually, all slow and grudging. “You said she. She was looking for me, in you.”

Luke nods. He can hear her cadence on _when are you going to remember your promise to me, Luke,_ almost perfectly, since he’s heard it probably hundreds of times.

“No one had any idea,” he says, which he realizes too late the other Luke will take as a condemnation, that no one could tell the difference — but being a replica wasn’t something that had crossed anyone’s mind as even _possible_. Except Jade, because Jade is also a suspicious jerk; but Jade had been in Malkuth, and the people around Luke in his childhood hadn’t even had the ability to guess. He hastens onward to the more important part of what he’s saying. “But Natalia kept asking, anyway.”

“Are you going to try to tell me she knew you weren’t me?” the other Luke asks. It sounds, surprisingly, less bitter than he has about this exact same thing in the past. Only resigned.

Luke figures he’s just withholding judgment for a minute or two. He shakes his head. “No, that’s not quite it. I can’t tell you that truthfully. But… she was _looking_.” That’s an important distinction, one he hopes the other Luke gets, even if Luke himself can’t quite put the right words around it yet. “That promise you made together… I think that was always the most important thing to her. I never even knew what it was.” He’d known it was part of the reason they were engaged, yeah, that he’d promised to marry Natalia — well, that the other Luke had promised to marry her — but he hadn’t had any concept of the rest.

Maybe the other Luke _could_ have proved who he was, that he was the real Luke, if he’d only had the chance to speak to Natalia.

Akzeriuth has taught Luke enough that he doesn’t offer the what if.

“She always wanted you back,” Luke adds softly, reflecting. “And she knew you weren’t there. She just — didn’t know how far away you were.” That sounds more correct.

When he looks up from his thoughts, the other Luke is staring away, off into the distance. Luke wonders about how smart it would be to go over to him, takes half a step and stops himself. He shifts foot to foot, talking himself into and out of it.

— Wait, how long has the stone been changing color?

Temporarily distracted, Luke looks around. It’s not all the way yet, but the stone has definitely gone sandy-pale in places, patchy like it’s growing moss. He likes this stone much better. It looks like the sun is lighting it, even though there isn’t any obvious sun.

It’s Baticul stone. A little more, and it could be the stone of the courtyard. There was a time Luke was so sick of it he never wanted to see it again. These days it seems more like home, and thinking about _that_ hits Luke with a sudden longing, so hard and fast it takes the breath out of him for a second.

The other Luke, if he had to guess, probably likes this stone better too.

When the other Luke finally turns around he seems better. More or less. He doesn’t look as angry as he usually does, even, which feels weirdly like seeing him without his armor does. Luke almost feels like he should look away.

“What are you going to do about her?” the other Luke asks.

Luke is kind of expecting there to be more to the question, so he waits several more awkward breaths. By itself, the question doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“What do you mean, what am I going to do about Natalia,” Luke repeats blankly. “She’s Natalia. I don’t need to do anything about her.” Mostly, Natalia does things about herself.

“Don’t play games with me.” Though the other Luke doesn’t move beyond a single step toward him, Luke still has the distinct impression of being pulled up by his collar. “You’re still engaged to her.”

That honestly hadn’t occurred to Luke, because _obviously_ Natalia is engaged to the other Luke. The real one. “Anything that’s in writing or whatever is going to say she’s engaged to Luke fon Fabre,” Luke points out, thinking this over as he goes. He’s not actually sure if there’s a physical contract or anything. The engagement is just something that’s been a fact of his life forever, a concept that exists as a foundation. “And that’s you.”

“Forgotten your own name now?” the other Luke says, snippy.

“Well, I don’t have to be Luke,” Luke says absently, not really thinking about it. “And it’s not like anyone would make Natalia do anything she didn’t want to do. I don’t think they could. If she wanted to break the engagement, she would. But she wants to be engaged to you.”

As much as he’s focused on Natalia, it’s probably a good thing she’s not in the room with them right now.

“What do you mean by _that_?” the other Luke demands.

Luke thought it was pretty obvious. “She… wants to marry you?” he tries. Maybe it’s the phrasing.

“No, not _that_.”

Well, at least the other Luke can grasp that she wants to marry him. Luke would have had to spell some really basic things out for him otherwise, and it would have been really embarrassing for both of them.

The other Luke shakes his head. “What did you mean, you don’t have to be Luke.”

Oh. Right. Luke said that, didn’t he. It hadn’t seemed like the most important part of the thought at the time. “I mean, I don’t necessarily have to be,” he says, trying out the sound of the idea again as much for himself as to see how the other Luke reacts to it. “I’ve only been Luke for seven years, and I was named after you anyway.” It’s not quite what he wants to say, and luckily the other Luke seems to be giving him a little bit of thinking room to figure out how to say the right thing. “I mean,” he tries again. “We’re both Luke. I’m me, and you’re you. But that doesn’t mean everyone _else_ has to call us both Luke, if it bothers you.”

That’s a bit closer. Luke’s not about to give up who he is. They both have the right to be their own Lukes, in their own ways. But Luke is secure enough in being himself, finally, that he can believe answering to something else for a while won’t change who he is.

“What are you suggesting?” At least the other Luke doesn’t sound furious.

“I don’t know yet.” Luke chews on his lip. He kind of wishes his sleeves were long enough to fiddle with. He paces on the spot instead, turning every couple of steps. “We don’t have to do anything about it right now, anyway. Who knows how long we’re going to be here? And it’s not like you were going to call me Luke anyway —”

Only — he did once, didn’t he? Luke had almost forgotten. It’s a hard time to think about, that between-period when he was tangled up in the other Luke’s mind, still reeling from the revelations of his nature. Sometimes that difficulty means Luke makes himself think about it, but mostly he just tries not to.

_Can you hear me, Luke_ , the other Luke had said. In memory, Luke can’t tell if it’s bitter or not. He assumes it was — he tends to assume the other Luke’s being bitter and sarcastic when he can’t tell otherwise — but maybe he’s not remembering right, either. It was a hard time.

“You said that before, too,” the other Luke says, and he’s definitely grumpy now.

“Well, _are_ you?” Luke folds his arms. It’s whiny to say all the other Luke ever does is insult him, so he doesn’t say that, but judging by the reaction either he’s thinking it too loudly or it shows on his face. The other Luke actually grimaces, and looks away again.

It’s a weird sort of progress, and Luke doesn’t know exactly what it means.

“What are you saying, that you want to be Asch instead?” The other Luke’s tone is hard to read, when he finally speaks.

_Want_ is the wrong word.

“If that’s easier,” Luke says after a brief hesitation. “I guess it’s better than ‘replica,’ anyway.” That’s what he is, but he doesn’t go around calling other people ‘human’ or whatever.

The other Luke grunts in a way that might be agreeing or might not be, and then doesn’t say anything at all.

Well, that’s not going to resolve anything. Still, Luke doesn’t know if he wants to poke at this issue right now, when he can’t even imagine what the right thing to do could be.

At least, he thinks, their surroundings still feel like Baticul, but not enough to be a prison. Luke sits down on the ground, then sprawls backward, staring at nothing in particular. Now what is he supposed to do? Be annoying enough to make the other Luke yell at him? Again?

It would solve the problem of immediate boredom, but probably not actually _help_ anything. Luke goes back to wondering whether or not memories of a younger Natalia would help. It balances out, really; there’s a bad outcome for every possible good one, and Luke doesn’t know how to tell which way the other Luke will go.

Sometimes he makes no _sense_.

Luke spares the time for a deep sigh of frustration, which gets a scoff from the other Luke. Okay. Obviously he isn’t getting anywhere trying to predict how the other Luke will feel. So, what if he turns it around? How would _Luke_ feel?

It’s not a good enough equivalence to think about Van, not with all the mixed feelings about him, so Luke’s going to have to rely on his imagination. What if the other Luke got to go back, and Luke couldn’t for another seven years? Would he want the other Luke’s memories of Tear?

Luke kind of thinks he would, honestly. Knowing he missed so much… it would be better to see her, even a little, instead of feeling like there was a seven-year hole that could never be reclaimed. On the other hand, Luke hasn’t had the opportunity to let resentment grow. And in every scenario he can imagine, Tear would _know_ she was speaking to the other Luke.

So he’s back where he started. Dammit.

Luke chases this problem in circles for a little while longer, until the other Luke toes him in the side. Luke grunts reflexively, sits up with a start.

The other Luke has taken his boots off, somewhere in the meanwhile, or that would have hurt a lot more than it actually did. Armored boots hurt. He scowls down at Luke with less feeling than usual. “Just ask.”

“Uh,” Luke starts, trying not to sound guilty. “Ask what?”

“Whatever it is you’re thinking about. You’re not getting anywhere.”

It’s true that Luke _isn’t_ , but he feels offended anyway. “I might be,” he says. “What makes you think I’m not getting somewhere?”

An eyebrow is raised. The other Luke looks at him like this is too stupid a question to actually answer; then he goes ahead and answers anyway, if grudgingly. “You’ve been thinking about it for hours. If you were going to get somewhere, you would have by now.”

As insulting as the other Luke’s accurate perception of Luke’s puzzling capabilities is, there are bigger problems. “Wait. Hours?” It didn’t feel that long. And the light isn’t moving at all, it just kind of _is_ , so there shouldn’t be any way the other Luke can tell time. “It can’t have been that long. I’ve just been… lying here.” Not even sleeping. If it had been hours, given everything _else_ , Luke should have had to sleep by now.

“It feels like hours.” The other Luke hasn’t stopped looming. Luke thinks about either standing up or dragging him down to his level. “Maybe you never had to develop a useful internal clock, but in Daath you can’t rely on the sun.”

That’s the most voluntary thing the other Luke has ever said about his time in the Oracle Knights yet. He’s about to point out how neither of them has needed to eat or sleep or do anything else bodily, but it re-occurs to him that if they’re just souls right now, enfolded in some combination of Lorelei and the seventh fonon, then they probably wouldn’t need to sleep. They can just _be_. It’s a mixed blessing.

“How do you know that’s still right here?” Luke asks. He thinks this much is a fair question. “It didn’t feel like hours to me, and we’re not really… anywhere.”

Maybe, though. Maybe it’s a good thing. If the other Luke takes hours to cool down and process things as much as he needs to, then he _has_ hours. Or what feels like hours. Is it still hours if only one of them is feeling it and time is possibly made up?

Luke’s head hurts.

“You’re making my head hurt with how hard you’re thinking,” the other Luke grumbles. “Don’t think you’re getting out of answering me, either.”

Luke has, in fact, been hoping just that. “Then sit down,” he says, without thinking about it. “I mean.” Oops. “You don’t have to, but you’re going to hurt my neck looming like that.”

He also privately hopes it will be a little harder to punch him sitting down, since there’s a better than average chance of what Luke was thinking about getting that reaction.

It takes a few moments. Luke almost doesn’t think it’s going to happen, so that when the other Luke actually does sit down, folding his legs up, it’s kind of a surprise. “Well?”

Right. Now he has to follow through. Luke grimaces. “I was wondering if you wanted any memories from that time,” he says, all in a rush. “From — the last seven years. Since this place kind of lets us show things to each other. I didn’t know if it would be…”

The other Luke is giving him the oddest look. Luke goes ahead and finishes the sentence despite that look, since the other Luke sometimes gets weird ideas about what Luke’s trying to say. “I don’t want to be cruel,” Luke says finally. “I didn’t know if you’d _want_ to know about any of what you missed. If it’s just a memory.”

But it’s all he has to offer. People don’t come back. Time doesn’t come back.

Still, nothing in response.

It occurs to Luke that his failure to find an answer earlier might have been an answer in itself. He couldn’t figure out how the other Luke would feel because the other Luke himself doesn’t know how he feels about the offer.

“It’s just a thought, anyway,” Luke adds when the other Luke continues to fail to respond. There’s a weight in the gaze on him — it couldn’t be more unlike looking in a mirror. It would be nice if he knew what the other Luke was looking for in him. “It’s not like —”

“Yes,” the other Luke interrupts. The interruption isn’t the strange part; the strange part is his leap straight to _yes_. He swallows hard then, throat working visibly, and looks away.

Luke waits for something else. Nothing comes.

“Okay,” Luke says when the waiting has stretched out enough to be uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just best not to question it for now. He still _wants_ to question it, of course. Figuring out what’s going on in the other Luke’s head is important.

But maybe after Luke shows him something. Maybe something good will have a chance to work its way in.

Well. As good as Luke’s memories can be for the other Luke, under the circumstances they’ve been given.

So. Luke thinks about Natalia. She’s easy to draw to mind, especially now; she is all-encompassing, defining and following just as much as Luke has followed her. She’s the snap of a bowstring and the low hum of the seventh fonon in knitting up what was torn apart. She may also be a loud, nagging voice on occasion, but Luke is aware now that he was a trying child for a variety of reasons.

That’s where he starts, then, brow furrowed and thinking too hard, drawing up memories of all the times he’d ever tried running from his lessons, and there are definitely plenty of those. There was only ever so far he could go, sure, with the Fabre manor and estate guarded to restrict movements in and out, but that only meant he got creative: going up instead of out. For a while he knew all the trees very well.

Baticul-stone gives way slowly to tidy grounds and trees. Mostly trees; there is an overwhelming impression of green, and there are surely too many branches around them to be any actual tree, except for maybe the ones in the Cheagle Woods. Definitely not the ones on the Fabre estate. They’re at tree-level, branch-level, on a level with a faint suggestion of a red-haired boy clinging to one of those branches, not settled on the ground where it’s safe. It’s definitely all more impression than fact.

But: the boy could still be either of them. He wavers and fades in and out, more red and hiding than anything else.

Below, what seems like an eternity of people are yelling about _Master Luke_. Luke is almost as unimpressed now as he was then. Almost. Now he understands a little more, and can sympathize with having misplaced something very important under your care.

“Really,” the other Luke says, not impressed with any aspect of this.

Luke bristles faintly. The original could at least have the decency to pretend not to be scornful when he’s _trying_.

“Just wait a minute, okay?” He’s consciously trying to do this, it’s not like it’s something full-formed and escaping him on its own emotional weight.

The other Luke makes a faint grumbling sound, but he does wait a minute.

It takes less than that minute for Natalia to come into view, standing much more solid than the shadow of a Luke beside them. Below, for the moment, and young, not more than thirteen or so, but all dignity and soft teal fabric and perfect posture. She isn’t calling out, only tapping one finger to her lips in thought, and after a little while of looking this way and that she tilts her head back.

Busted.

This is the first thing Luke has seen that makes the other Luke crack a smile. Only the bare hint of one, sure, and Luke is positive it would be gone if he did any more than move his eyes a little to the side, but it’s a success. It’s a smile.

Natalia sees the small Luke, the memory; the Luke sees her, and stiffens, seeing her seeing him.

“ _Luke_ ,” she says, precise and commanding with his name alone, even at this age. “ _Come down from there_.”

Luke does not want to, and it’s clear in the way the red and white of him sidles perhaps even closer to the tree. He remembers not wanting to very, very well. Down will be lessons, and more things he’s supposed to remember and can’t, and he’s not going to be able to remember them no matter how hard he tries, and half his teachers seem to think he just _won’t_ , and it’s all _terrible_.

It’s easy, looking back, to see how Master Van manipulated this in his favor. He knew exactly how much Luke knew and didn’t know and would never remember because he wasn’t the correct Luke, the original Luke. Of course he knew how Luke felt.

An argument ensues, back and forth between Luke and Natalia. Most of it is just a blur of noise and feeling, something to watch go back and forth, because there were so _many_ arguments with Natalia about being proper, about “comporting oneself as befits one’s station,” about _remembering_. It ends, as such arguments usually did, with Luke grumbling, and shifting himself down the tree, and jumping down the last several feet. The vantage shifts, pulling them along with him almost-seamlessly, with only a twist of disorientation to show that they’d moved at all.

Natalia gasps shortly, because she’s not entirely used to it yet. Give her a few years. “ _Luke_ ,” she admonishes again, and reaches for him, tugging fragments of green out of the red of his hair. “ _Honestly, you could have been hurt!_ ”

“ _’m fine,”_ Luke protests, and he bears Natalia’s attentions only so long before he pulls back, brushing at his hair on his own. “ _I’m not gonna get hurt_.” Not like he _could_ get hurt, with everyone breathing down his neck all the time. He’s more likely to get hurt by tripping over one of his many minders.

Natalia folds her arms, but she settles for the moment. The Luke of now recognizes this as a prelude to lecturing; judging by the very faint amusement the other Luke is wearing, so does he. The smaller, youngest Luke, the blissfully unaware idea of a Luke, lifts his chin in some kind of defiance of the established status quo. He thinks he’s gotten away with it, for about thirty more seconds.

“ _Everyone is only worried about your safety, Luke_ ,” she starts, and that’s as she means to go on. The lecture about safety fades in and out, as such things do, because even at this age it was very old to Luke and he wasn’t taking all that much note of it.

“What’s the point of this,” the other Luke says eventually, only a little sharply, barely managing to tear his gaze away from a young Natalia to eye up Luke suspiciously.

“I’m getting to it,” Luke says, nudging the memory. His are probably going to be like this, he thinks, the interminable stretches of lecture and boredom and _you need to be what we tell you to, Luke_. But his point is a little further along. Did it need the run-up? Maybe not. Luke isn’t sure he could have gotten here without it, though.

It comes out of the blue that day; that’s why he remembers it best. “ _How are you going to keep your promise to me if you keep running away from everyone?_ ” Natalia wants to know, impatient and impulsive for once, and in anyone else it would be a whine, but she is Kimlasca’s princess and is, at least for now, above _whining_.

“ _What promise,”_ Luke says automatically, and all of the Lukes can see how her face falls hard before she tries to pull it back together. The original Luke reaches over and thumps Luke on the shoulder. Absent a gauntlet, which is a plus, but with more force than is friendly or comfortable.

“Ow,” Luke says, and rubs the spot, but doesn’t try to scoot away. He figures he deserves that one.

Neither of them needs to talk about what that was for. Even the memory Luke, he recalls, has guilt gnawing in his stomach, an unpleasant thing he’s felt only rarely before. “ _I told you already, I don’t remember anything_ ,” he says defensively, making a childish effort to armor up against the painful feeling. “ _Wh-what did I promise you?_ ”

Looking back, now, Luke can very nearly identify the moment Natalia makes a decision. “ _You promised to marry me_ ,” she says, prim-formal. “ _Someday, when I’m queen of Kimlasca, you’re going to be my king. Understand?_ ”

The young Luke can’t find an answer for this. His impression of kings is his uncle Ingobert, who he’s met only a few times in ever, who is stuffy and maybe a little grumpy and insistent that Luke never leave the Fabre estate. He’d probably even prefer if Luke didn’t leave the manor at all. Luke is not, at this point in his life, a fan of kings, who think they can tell other people what to do. If he’s going to be a king, he’s just going to let people do whatever they want.

Natalia takes the lack of an answer as well as she can, all things considered, and this time the fall of her face is almost entirely hidden. “ _So please_ ,” she says, more gently than lecturing. “ _Try to remember that. Someday, please remember your promise to me, Luke_.”

Luke remembers her expression best of all, so that’s what’s clearest here, in the haziness of memory: a little bit sad, a little bit hopeful. At the time, he had hated that she was putting all this weight on him. He doesn’t want to disappoint her. He never has.

“It was always like this,” Luke says to the other Luke, for some measure of explanation, as the ghost looks away from Natalia, shoulders up and defensive. “I never knew what to do when she was asking.”

Abruptly Natalia’s form is taller, older, and she asks the same thing of a similarly grumpy Luke. There’s more red about him now, hair longer, mid-back, and Natalia has an awkward proportion to her limbs that’s mostly made elegant by the tailoring of her dress. Then she’s older again. Either she’s better at hiding the heartache, or she’s gotten used to the idea of Luke not remembering.

Over, and over, and over. The younger Lukes get older and more loudly grumpy. Luke himself pulls his shoulders up in unconscious defensive mirror, wishing he had a collar or a heavier coat to hunch into. He’s not especially fond of a lot about how he was, now that he has distance. And, arguably, maturity.

“That’s enough,” the other Luke says abruptly, as Natalia starts to look almost exactly like the Natalia they’ve both left behind. Luke can’t say he disagrees. He tries his best to disengage from the memory, but it’s hard — Natalia is easy to keep in mind, easy to remember, she’s been there his whole life. Natalia keeps happening, and the other Luke starts to get up, already turning away, obviously done. Damn it.

If he can’t not think of Natalia, then maybe he can think of something else. Tear comes to mind first. Tear and her hymns, at first new and weird, eventually familiar like a heartbeat. The courtyard — Tear’s boots on the stone — drowsiness like a storm — hyper-resonance tearing out from him and the softer glow of selenias —

When Luke manages to still his mind at all it’s to selenia flowers, to Tataroo Valley in the dead of night, and the salt-scent of the air from the ocean. He takes a breath — deep and shuddering; he might have accidentally been holding it while he thought too hard and too fast.

The other Luke paces away anyway, careful among the flowers even though they can’t possibly be real, even though they turn their faces toward the Lukes rather than the moon high above. At least he’s not all rigid, not stalking with the chin-up stone straightness Luke associated with the God-General. He’s just… Luke. Luke in a snit, maybe, but Luke.

On the bright side, Luke is not now yelling at Luke.

Luke sighs, and gets up carefully from among the selenias, and goes to look at the ocean.

It’s a memory-ocean, of course, flavored and shaped by his first thoughts of it: that it was impossibly large, that no real thing could exist and stretch that far, that silver under the moonlight. Here, it seems to go on forever, even though Luke can’t find the edge of the cliff no matter how far he steps. Every time he turns to glance over his shoulder, the other Luke is still there, still the same distance away, standing among the flowers with his head tilted back toward the sky.

_Now_ what. Luke doesn’t know. He’s not even completely sure that the memories of Natalia didn’t backfire. He sits down again, tries to dangle his feet over the edge of the cliff, and he only can as long as he doesn’t look or think too closely about it.

The idea hurts his head. His chest hurts, too, in that vague way that feels like he hasn’t been breathing deeply enough, only breathing deeper doesn’t really help.

Luke tries to stop thinking about that, too. Turning his thoughts toward the other Luke should be safe enough. He’s probably not going to summon a memory-ghost of someone who’s standing right there. He hopes. That could get very awkward, very quickly, and he’s not sure either of them are equipped for memories of, say, Yulia city right now.

Luke chances another glance over his shoulder. Nothing new from the other Luke. Instead he stares back at the mirror-bright sea and lets his mind drift.

Despite his efforts it’s still a busy mind. How long can they possibly be stuck here, this will get boring and infinite soon, are they sure they’re going to be able to go back to their bodies, Luke wants to go _back_ , he promised and all of their friends are going to be waiting, he promised but what if they think both Lukes are dead —

He’s jarred out of this by the other Luke dropping down next to him, briskly efficient in how he arranges himself and scowls at the there/not there paradox of the cliff.

“Just expect it to be a drop and think about something else,” Luke suggests, tearing his own gaze away to suit.

The other Luke pulls his legs up instead, crossing them and resting an elbow on one knee. He tilts his head to the side, leans it on his fist. “Did you ever do anything but complain?” he wants to know, eying Luke with an almost disinterested expression, his mouth curled down. The expression is absent thunderous eyebrows, which makes Luke think it’s out of habit rather than intent. A fine difference, but important anyway.

It’s such an abrupt query Luke takes a few seconds to scrape his thoughts together out of that inanity. “There was sword training,” he says slowly. Van hangs between them unsaid. Luke has the vague feeling that the other Luke is asking about something more than just the complaining, but he can’t quite think out the shape of what’s missing. “Sometimes… Sometimes, before I learned to read, Mother would read to me… And Guy was… fun. Hiding that we were closer friends than Father and Ramdas thought we should be was always…”

Like having a secret; like having a little bit of a control in a place where his life was given to him with no real options. Luke trails off for want of how to phrase this without sounding unbearably spoiled. Which he was.

But the other Luke has shifted slightly. Luke thinks he seems softer, though he can’t tell exactly _how_ and is afraid to comment about it. Maybe one of those things was the right answer.

It’s definitely not sword training. Luke wonders between the other two, but given how Guy and the other Luke seemed to circle each other like they were preparing for a fight instead of friendship, he _suspects_ it’s going to have to be Mother.

He wants to sit in the selenias just a little bit longer, to think about Tear and all the friends who are waiting. Jade, Luke is pretty sure, would just call this feeling sorry for himself. Luke has learned enough by now to know that Jade should not always be trusted about emotions, but in this case he thinks the grumpy Colonel-voice at the back of his head is probably right. There’s no use longing for the people who aren’t here, not right now. The person he can do anything about — the person he can maybe help — is sitting right next to him.

Okay.

Luke blows his breath out in a great huff, as though to clear those thoughts away, and he draws his legs up and stands, brushing the back of his pants off as if there’s actually any dirt to dust. The tails of his coat, ragged after everything they’ve been through, flap with the motion. Maybe he’ll wear something different, instead of repairing it, when they go back.

_When_ they go back.

Luke turns his back on the sea and puts his hands on his hips, surveying the too vast, too close field of selenias. They’re still vivid and glowing. Way too brightly. There’s too much emotion about this place, he guesses. Probably he loves it in a way, or at least what it represents.

Now isn’t the time for it. Luke soaks it in just a moment longer, and then carefully sets it aside. He has a little bit more of a grasp of how it feels mentally, now, to bring up memories through their surroundings. Slowly, slowly, the selenias fold away into brocade and mahogany, into the close walls of his parents’ rooms. _Their_ parents’ rooms.

“Who _asked_ you,” the other Luke demands as the world closes in around him, and he, too, gets up slowly. Luke watches him long enough to be sure it’s just reluctance and not pain, and then glances away so as not to be caught watching. His breath catches; Luke inhales deeply and it evens out.

The other Luke comes over anyway, standing at Luke’s shoulder with maybe a handspan between them. He folds his arms across his chest, a forbidding vision in black again, except for the places where his ungloved hands flash pale.

And also the fact he’s standing in his stocking feet. He’s _definitely_ less angry than he was. Luke thinks back, focuses on the warm nostalgia that his mother represents. He can’t bring anything specific to mind, but it happened dozens of times, he knows it did. All the memories sort of blur into each other in favor of the _idea_ of it.

The suggestion of their mother hovers in a few places. In the great armchair with a child curled at her side; on the edge of her bed or in bed; by the broad window with the curtains tucked back to let the light in. The curtains can’t decide if they’re drawn or not, and the light and the heavy fabric flicker back and forth in a sort of not-being that doesn’t bear observation very well.

“You’re not focusing right,” the other Luke says shortly, after some more of this. Their mother’s voice still sounds, a low reassuring patter, and there’s something rounded and warm about the whole room. But it’s indistinct, all those separate occasions becoming some single recollection that’s more sentiment than substance.

“I thought you didn’t ask me,” Luke says, nettled. He’s genuinely trying.

“Hmph.”

Luke will take this as acknowledgment that he’s right. He moves away, circling to the other side of the bed, trying to get the deep red of Mother’s hair to look right. The memory isn’t perfect. It’s never going to be perfect.

He misses her, he realizes with a sharp pang. He knew that. He knew he missed everyone. But it’s worse like this, realizing his memories will never capture the truth, not entirely. Why wasn’t it like this, remembering Natalia?

…Is this how the other Luke has felt, all along?

The idea of their mother sharpens, like she’s coming into focus. The other Luke reaches past him to neaten the lay of the bedspread where the weight of people has distrubed it, and frowns faintly at the fact his hand doesn’t want to do anything but pass through the thought of the bed.

“…Did she ever read to you?” Luke asks, quiet like if he’s too loud their mother will stop reading, some fragile peace broken.

The other Luke pauses. Takes his hand back, but doesn’t, in the end, turn away. “…Only when I was very young,” he says finally, equally soft. Neither of them really wants to break the spell of nostalgia that is a small Luke leaning against their mother, rapt on words he doesn’t yet understand how to pull off the page. “I barely remember it.”

For some time it’s just this: the two of them standing nearly shoulder to shoulder, not looking at each other but in perfect sync regardless. Luke finds his breath matching the other Luke’s, shallow.

Eventually the other Luke starts speaking again, and when he does it’s slow, halting, with some trouble finding the words he wants to use. “They were never…” A pause. Luke holds his breath. Then: “Father always knew, ever since they named me Luke, that I was supposed to die. And Mother…”

Harsh, to bring into such a nostalgic scene. But true. “Father tried to be distant,” the other Luke goes on. “He encouraged Mother to, as well, and I learned from him. Things like this — they didn’t last.”

“I never understood that,” Luke says. “Did they not _know_ the Score before they named you?” His relationship to the Score has always been a little stranger than most, but this is something he’s genuinely fuzzy on.

The other Luke shakes his head. “I don’t know.” It’s open, but a little less raw than the last. “Infants have their birth Score read, most of the time. The Grand Maestro came to the manor to read for me, I’m told. Does it matter, whether they had already named me? Even if they hadn’t, there was no other child who fit the description at the right time.”

Self-fulfilling prophecy. Luke wrinkles his nose at that and looks at their mother instead. “They loved you, anyway,” he says, abruptly thankful he’s not actually looking at the other Luke. “I know you think they should have known I wasn’t you —”

The other Luke elbows him rather abruptly. “I guess,” he says, in a sullen sort of a tone, “at least you did that job. Even if you were a terrible version of me, you kept them from worrying.”

Luke scoffs before he can help himself, and elbows the other Luke right back. “I gave them different worries. That’s not the same thing. They still lost their son. They just thought it was amnesia, not…” Any of the other options.

“Hunh.” The other Luke re-folds his arms.

It seems like that’s the end of that, for now. Luke can’t think of anything else to say. For this little space of time there’s the shared childhood memory, no matter how bittersweet, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, they can find a kind of a peace.

Then the other Luke starts talking again. “Both of us have reparations to make. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes,” Luke says immediately, leaping on the hope of it. Thoughts about not forcing or guilting Asch into things come only on the heels of it, and Luke winces, half-turning toward the other Luke to see what his face is doing. “I mean —”

“Try not to hurt yourself,” the other Luke says, definitely grumpy again as he meets Luke’s eyes. “I know what you meant.”

“Right.” Luke falls silent again, and this time the quiet isn’t so comfortable. Damn it. _Now_ what does he do? He thought he was making progress, sort of— he guesses it’s not like he’s about to run out of time, but it would have been nice if it wasn’t steps forward and back all the time.

“Hey. _Replica_.”

Luke startles from his troubled reverie. The other Luke has moved to be directly in front of him now; the specific memory is fading, bed gone into only thoughts of brocade, Mother vanished in favor of the impression of her kindness.

“ _Luke_ ,” the other Luke amends, grudging. Ligers could more easily have pulled it from him, but it makes Luke’s heart leap into his throat nevertheless. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Didn’t your Tear try to teach you that?”

It was a thing that came up enough that Luke doesn’t have to ask how the other Luke knows. There are things nothing can repair; there are mistakes he’ll never be able to make up for. And there is a time and place for acknowledging each. Mutely, Luke nods.

“Tch,” the other Luke says, and in a motion almost quicker than Luke can see, has a hand under Luke’s chin and flicks upward. It stings. Luke realizes only belatedly he’s been letting himself slump inward again. “Chin up.”

Luke is left rubbing his chin and trying to make sense of that as the other Luke turns to stalk away again. He doesn’t try to follow — _sometimes there’s nothing you can do_ — but he sits down where he is to think about it.

He does spare a couple of thoughts for wondering about something to sit on — a chair would be very nice — but the bed is gone and this formless space doesn’t seem to be very helpful with regards to shapes that aren’t memories. And even the memories aren’t all that solid. Luke will just have to manage.

_Sometimes there’s nothing you can do_. It’s probably not the key to all of the other Luke’s problems, but the more Luke thinks about it, the more it seems to sum up a lot of what was wrong with the other Luke, too. He was resigned to dying. Especially at the Tower of Rem — he was making his choices about death because he didn’t think the fact of dying was something he could do anything about, so he was taking the control he could about the manner. That makes… some sense. Luke, too, knows what that’s like. He still remembers being told he was going to die, and feeling it sink in that there was nothing to do about it. Even Jade had only been able to give him advice on how to manage it.

But here they are. And it looks kind of like both of them are going to live anyway, if the other Luke is done with his giving up nonsense. Luke frowns as he chews that over, too. It’s like the Score, and all the problems with it. People never seemed to try to avoid the bad things when they were told about them, only _managed_ them. Or if they tried to ignore the Score, they were told they shouldn’t, or the Order took steps to make the Score happen anyway.

In that way, there being ‘nothing someone can do’ looks a lot worse.

Luke decides he doesn’t like it. He turns the idea over a few more times, nods to himself, and gets up. It’s his turn to advance on the other Luke, instead of waiting for the other Luke to decide Luke maybe has done something annoying enough to warrant bothering with him.

The other Luke is looking over his hands. Luke observes for a few seconds just in case before deciding it can’t possibly be as important as telling the other Luke he’s being stupid.

“Just because you think there’s nothing you can do, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try everything anyway,” he says without other preamble. The narrowing of the other Luke’s eyes as he looks up is a dangerous one. Luke plows on ahead anyway. “That was the problem with the Score, wasn’t it? Or one of them, anyway. And you were going to follow M — Van for the reason of getting rid of it alone, because it said bad things were going to happen and it had made bad things happen to you, but there are other options beyond just ‘what the Score says’ and ‘what the Score doesn’t say.’ Even — even pointing yourself just at getting rid of the Score is still focused on the _Score_ , isn’t it? Not you, or things that could be done to save you, or — I mean. Sometimes there _is_ nothing you can do, but I think we always have to try first. To know if there isn’t anything. Not just listen to what someone else says or whatever.”

Silently, the other Luke beckons Luke a little closer, his face flattening out. Luke leans in; the other Luke promptly flicks him in the forehead. _Ow_. Luke reels. “I don’t want to hear that from someone who keeps letting other people choose his path,” the other Luke snaps. “Tear, Jade — the Tower of Rem — even here, you telling me you’ll let me call you whatever —”

He definitely has the wrong idea. Scowling, Luke snags the flicking hand out of the air, fingers circling the other Luke’s wrist. “It’s not _that_ ,” Luke says, officially done with backing down. “I listen to Tear and Jade because I care about Tear and what she thinks, and because Jade’s an expert at basically everything. The Tower —”

The space around them threatens to shift, hinting at the almost-sharp scent of Dawn Age technology. The other Luke makes a grimace identical to how Luke’s face feels, but Luke keeps talking. “A while ago, I had already made up my mind, that if it took dying to make up for Akzeriuth, then I would. I didn’t really understand what I was saying at the time. But I think I meant it, anyway.” He pauses. He’s already been over the name thing, sort of. What else can he say about it, to put it a way the other Luke will understand? “I figured it out, that’s all. I’m me. I don’t _need_ you or Van or anyone else to be okay with that. I’m me, and you’re you, and what we call ourselves doesn’t change that.”

The other Luke twists his hand, jerking his wrist from Luke’s grasp. Luke doesn’t really have a say in how that goes, it just kind of happens. He shakes his own hand out, grimacing. They eye each other, the original Luke with more wariness.

“I don’t understand you,” the other Luke says finally, but the wariness is subsiding into weariness. He shakes his head, a diagonal, neutral sort of a brush-off instead of a real denial. “That’s… not what I was talking about, anyway.”

_Oh_. Luke abruptly feels very stupid.

Something of it must show on his face. The other Luke laughs, a startled cat-rasp of a sound. “You want to make things better,” he says. Luke wonders if he can actually help the mocking tone that creeps into it, or if that’s just something that’s second nature when it comes to him. “You look at me and you see someone you want to _help_ , don’t you? You can’t. The training I went through, the kidnapping, the way Van manipulated me… that’s all over. It’s done. There’s nothing you can do, _Luke_.” There’s an angry, ironic twist to the way he smiles, such that Luke wouldn’t really call it a smile at all. “I am who I am.”

At least the other Luke kind of gets it, even if he’s being a jerk about it. That’s something. And it’s the second time here he’s called Luke, Luke.

And… Luke’s pretty sure the only reason the other Luke is being an asshole is because he’s hurt.

He can’t let it lie at just that, anyway, and he’s forging ahead before he knows it. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it has to affect your future the same way,” he says, waving a hand like this will help get his point through somehow. “And it doesn’t have to hurt the same way, either, right? It’s always going to have _happened_ , but bad things don’t have to rule you forever. Sometimes —” In for a gald, in for a hundred — “sometimes it helps if someone’s there with you —” Luke _knows_ he sounds stupidly idealistic but he really means it.

Before he can grasp some further words the other Luke laughs faintly, and it’s all ugly and bitter, not the previous almost genuine humor. “You want my past, too?”

“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” Luke snaps. “Stop _doing_ that.” They were almost understanding, they were _just_ talking civilly before this, and the other Luke has to keep assuming the worst. And he understands, really he does, why the other Luke is so possessive about the few things that are his and only his, regardless of whether they’re good or not, but the whole thing is driving him _mad_. “I only mean it was better, with other people who knew what I was going through —”

All abruptly the other Luke reaches out, lunging like a snake, and he has hold of Luke before Luke can do anything about it. “ _Fine_ ,” he says with venom, leaning to press their foreheads together. This close Luke can see every fine-worn line at the corners of the other Luke’s eyes, and his stomach ties itself in knots. “You want to know, then _here_.”

_Here_ encompasses emotion, shoved with force at the link between them, where it shivers down into Luke, rings around his brain and overwhelms him. Emotion first, and memory follows after. It feels like being inside a bell, clear and tolling and sound like a physical force. Luke splinters, loses himself somewhere in the middle of sound and emotion and memory.

Maybe it’s a good thing they’re only seventh fonons and souls right now.

The other Luke might be tired, but his emotion carry a vast weight. All the dim halls of Daath and all the fights and all the little manipulations Van forced on him, subtle and obvious alike, blur into each other all, settling into Luke as an unhappy stone at the bottom of his heart, something that only grows bigger, blocking out the space where happiness or even contentment could go.

There is very little _good_. There is the idea that he can do better, be respected, be what Master Van wants, and then things will be better — there is the idea of getting rid of the Score, of the thing that’s put him here like this — there is under it a gnawing loneliness like hunger that never goes away, and the vague awareness that what he’s doing is wrong, and yet: he still looks up to Van, still follows his ideals.

And there’s Natalia. There’s always Natalia. Only the thought of her, the thought of something more, the hope of a promise to be kept. The idea that if anyone would know him, it would be her. She hangs like a lantern above everything, a star close enough to see but forever out of reach. And far, far more prominent than that hope is the loneliness, tying itself through every memory of pain and horror and ugly necessity until it’s a tangled knot of a restraint. Until he doesn’t know how to reach out any more, not really, and there is no space for good things to fit around everything else.

How long is it he drifts there, in those feelings? Knowing no one and nothing is there for him to reach out to, and that he will keep going anyway because there’s nothing else, because he has a _duty_?

When Luke can think of himself in his own, left-handed body again, when he manages to climb out of memory and emotion and back into being Luke, his eyes are damp and his ears are ringing; and the other Luke is still there, still leaning his head against Luke’s, though his eyes have closed now.

Tear-tracks still glisten on his cheeks, too.

“Luke —”

“ _Don’t_ ,” the other Luke snarls, raw and savage coming from deep inside him, and he pulls away as easily as that, spell broken. “What have I said about _pitying me_.”

Mostly, not to do it, but that’s not _it_. Luke eyes the other Luke, who’s turning away, and considers a very stupid idea.

The other Luke starts _actually_ walking away. The stupid idea wins over doing nothing. Luke takes a few steps after him and then flings himself headlong at the other Luke.

“What are you —” The other turns at the footsteps, but barely soon enough to react, and clearly not expecting something even _this_ stupid. Luke’s careless tackle catches him around the waist and they both go skidding to the ground. Luke is on top briefly; then the tables turn and the other Luke has him mostly pinned, and in retrospect Luke doesn’t know what he expected. The other Luke slams his shoulders down, knocking the wind out of Luke, his face furious and confused and a whole mix of other things all at once. “ _What do you want_.”

…It’s better than the other Luke simply getting up and going on his way. He’ll take it. Luke wriggles unsuccessfully, trying for an advantage; the other snarls, and lets him get maybe an inch up before slamming him down again.

Luke stops.

“You have my attention,” the other Luke says, low and intent and maybe a little bit mean. “ _What_.”

Luke marshals himself and stares up into the other Luke’s eyes, and, with no small amount of effort, makes himself relax. “Hear me out,” he says. “Don’t walk off in the middle, all right? I’m not going to say it right, I know I’m not, but I’m trying. Please just try to listen.”

The other Luke looks deeply suspicious about this, but eventually gives a shallow, grudging nod. Crimson hair, jarred loose, falls in a curtain down around them.

“Okay,” says Luke. “Okay.” How does he say this? He’d better think fast. “I’m not _pitying_ you. All right?” There’s a chip on the other Luke’s shoulder the size of the Tower of Rem, he swears. “It’s not _about_ that. I can tell a little better what happened to — no. How you were trained. And it was terrible and no one should have done that to you, Van didn’t _deserve_ to be our master, but that’s not _pity._ That’s _being a decent person_.” He’s breathing hard, now, and he can’t quite catch his breath even when he takes a break. He himself is surprised by how much he feels about this. “I feel bad for what happened to you because it was unjust and cruel and stupid, not because I think you need me to, or because I think you’re broken, or whatever the hell it is you think I’m thinking. All right? So stop — stop expecting me to be looking down on you. I’m not him and neither are you.”

The original Luke is exceptionally quiet after this. For several moments all that splits the air is the sound of their ragged breaths.

“Is that it?” he finally asks, with the same sort of low rough intensity as before.

“…Two more things,” Luke says, since this is a good chance for it. He doesn’t know if he’ll get another good window.

Again, the tiny grudging nod. Luke presses onward. “You’re not alone. You’re not alone any more, and you’re not going to be alone, not ever unless you really _want_ to.” He still can’t actually tell for sure if the other Luke hates him, but he _thinks_ hate isn’t a thing that’s happening here. Just a lot of anger. “Especially once we go home. But — I’m not going to force you into it, either. Or — look, I know you’re about to yell at me for thinking I can force you into anything in the first place, just — your future should be your choice. That’s all it is.”

He’s hot-faced and embarrassed when he finally manages to stop talking while he’s ahead. Eloquence is not really one of his strengths.

Somehow, though, Luke seems to have cut the other Luke’s anger off at the knees. His expression has gone incredulous, his grip slack, and after Luke has stopped talking, the other Luke sits back, becoming a weight on Luke’s abdomen rather than his shoulders. “You don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do.” An instant response. Luke props himself up on his elbows.

“Even if I tell you I want to die?”

“Uh —” Luke honestly didn’t think it that far through. His impulses war with each other; he freezes somewhere between _you can’t die_ and _I promised to save you_.

The other Luke’s shoulders shake as he covers his eyes with one hand. After a moment, Luke realizes he’s laughing. “Don’t hurt yourself,” the other Luke says before long, dry but not bitter. “I was joking.”

At least the other Luke has a sense of humor back. If he ever lost it. Maybe he just misplaced it for a while? Luke squirms faintly. “I still want you to come home with me,” he says, clarifying. “Just… If you need to do other things for a while, I’m not going to try to stop you.”

Luke makes no promises about Natalia. He figures the other Luke can fight that battle on his own.

The other Luke studies him for some time. “Is that everything?” he says, after the silence of it has turned oppressive.

Briefly, Luke racks his brain for anything else he needs to make sure the other Luke hears, while he’s still listening. Nothing comes to him. “Yeah. That’s all I needed to say right now.”

“Hmph.” The other Luke leans over him. Luke looks up at him wide-eyed, but all the other Luke does is flick the center of his forehead before getting up and stalking off.

Luke notices again that the other Luke is only wearing socks. It really makes him seem less forbidding, for all that it’s a little thing.

He drops back to the floor to stare up, wondering if that did anything, if he’s said entirely the wrong thing or if he’s made some kind of a breakthrough. He can’t _tell_ , even though they’re the same at the core.

_Ugh_.

He’s kind of hoping the other Luke will come back over at some point, but it’s sure not happening immediately. Time stretches on, and the space subsides back into the weird seventh-fonon void without memory coloring it, and the other Luke is still doing something that involves introspection and not wearing boots. Well, fine. Luke can do introspection too.

Speculatively, as though it will put them on more even ground, he pulls his boots off too. Not like his are armored or anything, not like the other Luke’s, but he feels a little better this way. He has a minor debate with himself about his jacket, but in the end drops that too, rolling his shoulders and stretching. It was pretty beat up, anyway, and if these aren’t their actual bodies then his actual jacket will probably still be there.

Eventually Luke goes back to forms. The other Luke doesn’t seem like he’s about to start anything, and so time passes on and on, and Luke fills it with whatever he may. Forms, stretches, vague attempts to summon up surroundings he knows. Sometimes there’s a sky. Luke paces. Occasionally he gets Tear’s hymns to ring through the air — this, though, nets him a cranky look from the other Luke, so Luke stops that. At one point when he’s feeling especially homesick, he tries humming them instead. He’s heard them enough he should know them, but the melody doesn’t sound right, and his voice only sounds flat.

When he turns around next the other Luke is right there, looking irritated. Damn it, was even that too annoying? What’s Luke _supposed_ to do? But all the other Luke does is prod him in the stomach.

Reflexively, Luke reaches for the spot. “What was that for?”

“Breathe better.”

Luke thinks about that for a moment or two and decides it makes no sense. If anything he would have assumed the other Luke was annoyed about the humming or about the fact his stomach is still bared. “What?”

“…You were singing.”

The two of them stare at each other confused. “I was _humming_ ,” Luke says. “It’s not the same thing. And how does that mean you poke me in the stomach, anyway?”

“You can do better.” A pause, and Luke can practically see the process as the other Luke decides he isn’t going to let it go. “It comes from the same place, it’s a tune and it uses your breath and your vocal cords. Stand up straight. Breathe from your stomach, not your chest.”

Luke is too bemused to actually argue with this. He does as instructed for once, with the other Luke prodding him again and again until Luke gets the basics of breathing for the idea of _sound_ , not just general function. It’s weird, and sometimes his chest tightens up and makes it harder, but he can do it. “This will help you in combat, too,” the other Luke finally says, grudgingly. “Having a better foundation. You’re good _enough_ , but you could be better.”

“I get it,” Luke says, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. He really _does_ know he’s not better than the original Luke at anything except maybe optimism. “I only beat you because you were already injured and your fonons were separating. I _know_.” He’s maybe a little proud of the accomplishment anyway, but — not anything that came after it, really.

“You still hesitate over human enemies. You’d have been worse at handling the replicas, anyway.” The other Luke scowls at him, but Luke has the definite impression his heart isn’t in it. “You aren’t — as inferior as you think I think you are.”

That’s way more complicated a sentence than it needs to be. Luke wrinkles his nose.

“You’re the one who keeps saying I’m stupid.” And a bunch of other things, though he guesses over the last little — whatever amount of time it is — the other Luke does seem to have been easing up. Some.

The other Luke bristles for reasons Luke can’t currently begin to guess at. “Because you are. It’s just not —”

Words seem to fail him. Luke eyes him suspiciously, but opts to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. After all, Luke’s had his own moments of having absolutely no idea how to phrase what he’s trying to say, and the other Luke has probably spent more of the last seven years yelling than anything else. They can make allowances for each other, right?

“You’re not where you should be, and you’re not where you _could_ be,” the other Luke says finally, grudgingly allowing these things. “You’re obviously good enough with a sword to beat Van, but you had help or you wouldn’t have. And either your tutors were terrible or you weren’t paying attention.”

It was a little of both. Luke tries not to let exactly how sheepish he is show, but judging by the other Luke’s sigh it isn’t good enough a disguise. “And while obviously you’ve improved since the first time we fought —” Luke swallows involuntarily. Yulia City’s Qliphoth-dim shades the space around them. The other Luke scowls at him further, the stress-worn lines in his face deepened by it. “— past a certain point you’re self-taught, and Guy’s techniques will only get you so far. We’re built differently than he is. _Stop that_.”

With some effort, Luke drags his mind away from those first jagged realizations of his fault and their nature. Neither of them really breathes easier until neutral tones take over the light again, instead of miasma-burgundy.

Instead Luke wonders if that’s the first time the other Luke has said _we_. He isn’t sure, but still: somehow it feels like a shift.

“How does all this add up to stupid?” Luke wants to know, when the other Luke doesn’t say anything else. What he just said actually sounds kind of positive, coming from the other Luke. Not glowing, obviously, but not _terrible_.

He doesn’t get an answer immediately. The other Luke paces away, paces back, and shifts like he can’t find a way to stand that actually works. When he speaks it sounds like a significant effort. “It’s not about what you are. It’s about what you’re _doing_ with it. You’re… competent.”

Luke would take this more happily if it sounded like the other Luke were at all happy about it. It does kind of sound like complimenting him makes the other Luke’s stomach turn. But the other Luke is still talking, so Luke pays attention and tries his best to understand.

“But you’re not _acting_ like it,” the other Luke goes on, strained. “It’s like I said earlier. Even if you know who you are, you’re still letting other people drive you. You react, you don’t _act_. Even if you mean it well, it’s not — it’s not.”

It’s the most not-angry words Luke has heard him string together in some time. And he finds he can’t really deny it, either, even though he wouldn’t have thought of it himself.

“Well —” he says defensively, and stops, and closes his mouth on the argument. He has to think things _through_. The Luke who is reasonably sure he is more competent at being Luke eyes the younger Luke sidelong, but he doesn’t speak yet. “I’m still… young,” Luke says eventually. “I know that. I only really have seven years of experience, and a lot of that I spent being _actually_ stupid, not the way you mean it. So — it makes sense, that I should listen to other people —”

The other Luke shakes his head immediately, cuts the air with a knife-blade of a hand. “No,” he says, brusque. “That’s cowardice. That’s being a _puppet_.”

_Puppet_ stings. Luke jerks involuntarily, flinches back. The other Luke turns away. “Just _acting_ isn’t the answer either,” Luke says hotly. “That’s what I did at Akzeriuth, I didn’t _listen_ to anyone —”

“Shut _up_.”

Luke shuts up.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” the other Luke goes on, low and rough like gravel as he comes back toward back toward Luke. “Akzeriuth is _your fault_. If you had listened to anyone else, anyone who was telling you to stop, Akzeriuth might not have happened the way it did. _But_.” Luke finds himself abruptly gripped by the loose neck of his undershirt, one of the other Luke’s hands at each shoulder, and it’s only by the grace of their matched heights that he isn’t dragged _up_. “Van was manipulating you, too. That wasn’t you _acting_. That was you being led along by the nose because you liked being the center of his attention.”

Huh. For once, Luke actually gets it, just like that. The other Luke isn’t absolving him, and they both know it. Luke’s going to carry that weight the rest of his life. It’s just that Luke wasn’t _doing_ it, not the same way Van was, carrying his intent and dreadful purpose along in a broad wave of destruction.

The other Luke lets go of him, and absently brushes his shirt back into place. It’s such a little gesture, to make Luke’s heart twist like it does. What would it have been like, having a brother?

Probably a lot like having Guy, actually, only without the fear of getting caught being friends.

It’s kind of a stupid train of thought, wondering what if. Things turned out this way, not any other way. Luke shakes himself back to more immediately important thinking. “Is that why it keeps bothering you?” he asks, finally grasping some semblance of the problem. “When I say I’ll do what you want, or that I don’t really care what you call me?”

The other Luke eyes him sidelong again, cautious. Like he’s looking for a trap. Luke can’t even think how there would be a trap here. Eventually there’s a quick flicker of a grudging nod from the other Luke. “I — wanted,” he says. Each word sounds like a struggle. “All that time. To be me, to be _Luke_. To have my _life_ back. And you just — kept acting, you _keep_ acting like it doesn’t even matter. If you were going to take my life, at least you should have done something with it.”

Luke would argue that he stopped Van, which qualifies as doing something, but he can practically hear how that discussion would go. There would either be something pointed and vitriolic about stop versus kill, or they would both rest in the fact that Luke had only been able to do with _both_ their strength, and either way, all of that is some arguing Luke doesn’t honestly want to do. Not when he’s starting to understand.

“I didn’t know,” he says, which he knows is a weak defense, but it’s the only one he has right now. No, that’s not quite right — he’s not really trying to defend himself. That’s kind of pointless. He just wants to make sure he and the other Luke actually do understand each other. “…I mean. There’s a lot I didn’t know. And it’s not an excuse, I just — didn’t understand.” It’s easy not to understand why it matters when you haven’t been there, he thinks.

“No,” the other Luke agrees, caustically. “You didn’t.” Nothing else follows, just that agreement. Luke didn’t understand.

It makes better sense now, that the other Luke calls him stupid.

“I think,” Luke says, and he stops, and he isn’t sure if he should say this out loud, but the other Luke is looking at him expectantly, so he plunges ahead anyway. “It didn’t matter, at first, until I learned I was a replica, and then it was —”

He stops again. The other Luke sighs. There’s a horribly knowing quirk to his mouth, like a smile dragged sideways by regret. “Like you had to hold on tighter,” he says. “Like your name was suddenly all you had.”

“…Yeah,” Luke agrees. It had been about like that. He guesses the other Luke really would know. “And it was — I got used to being me, right? But no matter what changes about my situation, I’m always going to be the person who destroyed Akzeriuth. I can’t forget that, and I _shouldn’t_. But the me that I am, the me that I’m becoming — if I act on my own, I might screw up again.”

“You’re scared.” The other Luke sounds weirdly compassionate about this. “So you follow other people, and you react instead of acting, because at least that way it’s _not your fault_.”

That’s downright uncomfortable, and the words make Luke squirm inside. He doesn’t like this about himself. He hasn’t even really thought about it in these words before. But it’s true. “…You’re right.”

The other Luke comes closer, reaches out. Luke can’t decide what he’s doing — it could almost be the beginnings of a hug, only the other Luke doesn’t do that at all — and then the other Luke cuffs him upside the head, scattering Luke’s vague daydreams.

“ _Ow_.” Luke ducks away and rubs the spot. “What was that for?” He honestly can’t think what this time.

“Think about the Tower of Rem, replica.”

Luke thinks about it, though he really doesn’t like to. The height of it; the desperate wrestling with Asch over the Key of Lorelei. The other replicas, all around them.

— Ten thousand.

“There you go.” Judging by the other Luke’s wearied tone, the realization shows on Luke’s face. “I killed ten thousand replicas to neutralize the miasma. Or would have — I’m not going to argue with you about which one of us it was.” This is, Luke will admit, fair enough. There had been two sets of hands on the Key, and they’ve more or less agreed already that intent matters as much as the doing.

The other Luke snags his wrist as Luke tries to edge out of slapping range. “Listen to me. Our hands are _covered_ in blood. That isn’t going to go away if you’re uncertain.”

“I know it’s not going to just _go away —”_

_“Listen_.” A shake of his hand shakes Luke’s, too. “The exact number doesn’t matter. It’s more than either of us is ever going to be able to make up for. And you don’t make that _better_ by not doing things. You have to make that weight worth something, and you’re not going to get anywhere being unwilling to take any risks, unwilling to bear whatever other mistakes you might make on the way.”

Luke wonders when the other Luke learned to be okay with this. If he was always so self-possessed, or when he learned the weight of taking a life.

“Stop looking at me like that.” The other Luke shoves Luke’s hand away. “I don’t have all your answers.” But halfway through stalking off, as he does, the other Luke turns back, as if something’s occurred to him. “There’s your deal.”

“…What?” Luke has already had his thinking rearranged quite thoroughly. Following the other Luke’s line of thought here is an almighty effort, and one he can’t quite track.

“I’m coming — _home_ with you,” the other Luke says, jabbing a finger at him like it’s an accusation, like home is an insult. “Not _Baticul_ home. Not – at first, anyway. But I’ll come back to where we were, and I’ll try to live. And _you’re_ going to start living and deciding things for yourself.”

That hardly seems fair, is Luke’s first thought. The other Luke promptly scowls. Again. Still. “I’m not asking you anything you’re not asking me,” he says, aggrieved. “Unlearn everything you’ve been doing, and start again.”

That’s right. Didn’t the other Luke say he didn’t know how to go home?

Luke settles down, putting away his instinctive bristling. Slowly he nods. “Fine.”

“…Fine.” The other Luke stares at him, but doesn’t turn to finish walking away.

Luke has the distinct impression the other Luke is waiting for something, but he can’t tell what. They stay there, staring at each other, waiting for someone to break the impasse. Eventually it’s the other Luke. “I’m not going to decide your name for you,” he says. He thumps a hand on his chest — grimaces — stills. “I’m Luke. That’s mine. I don’t care what you call yourself, now, but tell me what it is.”

It’s not like Luke hasn’t been thinking about this, off and on, but all the same he hesitates. The other Luke might not approve of it. But then again — that’s their deal, isn’t it? Luke makes his own choices, instead of waiting for someone else’s approval, and then he deals with the results himself.

So. Both of them being Luke is going to be confusing for everyone. And Luke is Luke, and it’s entirely fair for him to want his name back. Is he just changing his name for everyone else’s convenience?

He gives that its due consideration, too. And — yeah, okay, that’s a little of it. But he thinks it’s mostly about the other Luke. The one who was Luke first. And the fact that Luke, as the younger — person? The younger brother? The newest person in the family? Whatever he is, he figures changing his name, at least for now, is a way to declare that he’s not taking the original Luke’s place any more. He’s got his own place, yeah, but they’re not trying to fit into the same spot.

Lucky for him, there’s a ready-made name, right there. Maybe he’ll think about it again later — but for now, this works. Luke nods, to himself and to Luke. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I think… I think I’m going to be Asch, now.”

He can’t quite help the instinctive look to see if this is approved, to see if Luke is going to get angry about Luke taking more things from him. But — it’s a kind of equality, isn’t it? Luke can’t give the years back, but he can do this. Let Luke be the ashes for now.

There’s a long, assessing stare in turn. Finally, finally, Luke nods in turn. “All right,” he says, and offers his hand, and Luke — Asch — looks at it blankly before realizing what he’s supposed to do here. He clasps Luke’s hand.


	3. Chapter 3

“…This is going to confuse everyone else we know,” Asch says blankly, once Luke has let go of his hand. It’s a good decision, still, he thinks. It’s been maybe thirty seconds and he feels right about it. And he’s still the same person, and they’re going to find a way to exist together instead of one having to take the other’s place. This isn’t about who’s the _real_ one, not any more. It’s just that they’ve chosen the solution which will mix them up the most.

“Except Natalia,” Asch amends, because Natalia has known both of them for years and at this point is probably going to be able to tell them apart just by looking. And probably Tear, come to think of it. Tear knows him a lot better than she knows Luke.

“You’re an idiot,” Luke says promptly, clipping the back of his head. “You still have short hair, there won’t be much confusion.”

“People kept calling me Asch before and wondering why I’d cut my hair so suddenly,” Asch points out. “I think Spinoza asked if I was wearing a wig?” Asch wrinkles his nose in contemplation of which one of them was supposed to have been wearing the wig.

Luke makes a disgusted noise. “Those are strangers.”

“Even Spinoza?”

“ _Even Spinoza_. I didn’t spend more time with him than I had to. Why are you fixating on this?”

It’s better than trying to figure out what they’re actually going to have to do to make all this work when they do get home, and it’s better than being bored. Probably, Asch thinks, the Fabres would have to adopt him, even though he’s already their son, and he has no idea how that’s done. Eventually he shrugs, opting not to go through all this with Luke. “I’m looking forward to going home,” he says, which kind of sums it up. “I can’t even tell how long we’ve been here, can you?”

“It really is that simple in there, isn’t it.” This is accompanied by a light rap of Luke’s knuckles on his head, softer than everything previous. All the same, Asch grumbles and ducks away. Luke shakes his head in answer. “No, I can’t. I have a good internal clock — usually — but this isn’t like other places. We’re probably not even physical, remember?”

“Ugh,” Asch says by way of response. They’ve more or less settled things; why can’t their bodies conveniently be ready to go around the same time? “So we’re just stuck here alone indefinitely?”

“We already covered that. Try not to sound so thrilled.” Luke’s sarcasm doesn’t sound as bitter as it could. “I might start thinking you actually want me around.”

Asch doesn’t even know how to take that. Is it a joke? Is it genuine grumpiness? He himself doesn’t feel grumpy in echo, but even so that only seems to happen sometimes. “It’s not that,” he says. “It’s just, it feels like it’s been forever.”

“You were the one who said you were willing to wait for me,” Luke reminds him.

“I’m not changing my mind.” This Asch gets out in a rush — he wants to make it clear immediately. More slowly, he adds, “I just want to go home, too.” He can want that _and_ be determined not to go anywhere without Luke.

“Hm.” Luke eyes Asch a little while longer, but he doesn’t actually argue it. Instead what he does is press a hand to his chest, eyes half-closed in contemplation. A pained grimace slowly overtakes the more contemplative look. “...Well, whatever. It's going to be a while yet, anyway.”

“Huh?” Asch makes the connection late, about where Luke has his hand. There’s the jolting memory of swords, and of Luke being too still and too cold. Asch tastes blood like a memory. “— But you're okay, though, aren't you?”

By the time Luke opens his eyes he’s pale, paler even than his normal hasn't-seen-the-sun-enough pallor. “I can still — feel it —”

He was fine before now, though —! Well, no, he wasn’t. Not all the time. Back when this first started, Luke had trouble breathing at first, had been walking wounded; and now that Asch thinks about it, he’s been feeling like he can’t fill his lungs all the way half the time, can place half a dozen different instances where he just couldn’t catch his breath. Luke had gotten better, though. Asch tries to think of any similarities in the times when he hadn’t been able to breathe right — mostly fails, and definitely panics. “Stop thinking about it, then!”

The response is narrowly rolled eyes as Luke’s inhalation rasps. He doesn’t say anything, there’s just that sharp drag of breath again and again. It looks and sounds — kind of like he’s panicking, actually, if that was ever something Luke did. Asch isn’t convinced Luke can panic, but he can feel the echo of it now, the desperation of needing to breathe and suddenly being aware of pain he had thought was mostly gone, of blood in places it shouldn’t be, of the fact that his lungs can’t quite hold air right yet even though they’re trying —

Asch lunges to catch Luke as he folds. “Damn it — stop thinking about your body!” They’d be down on the floor in a pile if not for Luke's control; he drops to one knee, braces one hand on the floor. Asch ducks under the other arm, worry removing any concerns he might have had about touching in favor of trying to keep Luke up. Being upright should be better for this sort of thing, right?

Luke slits one baleful green eye at Asch. “What. Do you think.” Another rasping breath. “I’m trying to do.”

Asch definitely deserves that. “Okay, okay.” At least Luke doesn’t sound as bad as he did before. “Lecture me on how terrible I am at something else, that’ll take your mind off it.”

That marks an improvement. Luke hooks his fingers into the back of Asch’s shirt and uses that leverage to straighten up, if only apparently so he can glare. “I’m fine. You’re uneducated, not an imbecile.”

Yeah. That’s better. Asch debates about the arm he still has around Luke. If he moves, Luke will probably notice, and he’s not convinced Luke is actually all the way okay yet. He’s just going to stay very, very still for the moment. “I’m trying to learn, at least,” he says. “Although...” Well, the worst Luke can do is say it’s stupid, right? Asch is used to that. “There wasn’t really time for it, since we were all focused on Van, but — I’m a seventh fonist like you. Doesn’t that mean I could learn healing artes, too?”

“Huh.” The glare is downgraded to something more assessing and less offended, but Luke still doesn’t sound great. Asch doesn’t like the rasp. “In theory, you could,” Luke says slowly. “I don’t know more than one or two, myself. You’d be better off asking Tear.”

“She was helping me learn to use hyperresonance on purpose.” She’s a pretty good teacher, actually. Asch needs to make sure to thank her for everything some more; there’s some things he’s only now appreciating fully. “But she’s not here right now, and you are. Why do you say one or two? Shouldn’t you know how many artes you know?”

“Schools of thought are divided on Guardian Field.” Asch recognizes the name and brightens faintly. He knows that one, he just didn’t realize it could be used for healing. By contrast, Luke goes back to scowling at him. “Don’t think I don't know what you’re doing.”

Asch isn’t exactly trying to be subtle. He’s been told he’s not very good at it, anyway. 

Luke gestures with his free hand, like he’s trying to wave Asch away. What he doesn’t do is shove Asch off of him. “It’s fine. I’m not going to fall apart, I can manage it now that I know how. I just —” He pauses for a careful breath, which sounds better than the ones before.

After a few more moments Asch nudges him. “You what?”

“It's nothing.”

Nothing kind of sounds like something. Asch nudges Luke again, more gentle than he might have been ordinarily. 

“Either help me the rest of the way up or knock it off.”

This is going to be one of those things Asch has to figure out for himself, isn’t it.

“I’m not sure you’re fine if you need help up.” Asch stops nudging him regardless, at least for the moment.

“I don’t need the help.” As though to prove it, Luke shoves down on Asch’s shoulder, shifting his weight as though to rise. “But if you’re going to insist on clinging to me, you might as well be useful.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to,” Asch grouses right back, but he moves his arm around Luke a little lower to get a good grip, and offers his support properly. They get up leaning on each other, and somehow neither of them pulls away as soon as they’re standing, and Asch wonders — Natalia probably hugged him, right? Somewhere in the few moments they could steal? She couldn’t just not have touched him at all, right?

Definitely no one else had, especially judging by those memories. Asch still hasn’t consciously processed everything Luke shoved at him, but there wasn’t any notable warmth at all, and he’s pretty sure if everything was that bad, then anything at all good would have to stand out by contrast. Nothing did.

Next question: Is Luke going to punch him if Asch hugs him? It’s possible. But, Asch thinks, if he hugs Luke, then there’s also a pretty reasonable chance that Luke will be too distracted by the indignity or whatever he considers it to actually think about his real body and how it’s still injured.

Worthwhile price to pay, on the whole. Asch angles his body a little. Luke doesn’t appear to notice. Asch edges, and edges further, sneaking up on it.

Luke notices before Asch can actually finish the motion, and narrows his eyes suspiciously. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Now or never, then. Asch grins a sheepish grin to cover the fact that he is definitely up to something, and then lunges the rest of the way in, wrapping his arms around Luke. He makes sure to leave Luke’s arms free in turn, since pinning those would definitely be taken as a threat, and he braces for impact.

Luke goes very still as Asch rests his head on his shoulder. He’s frozen stiff, rigid and unyielding, but he at least isn’t trying to pry Asch off him. That’s a start.

“I don’t need you to hold me up,” he says, with some sharpness.

“It’s just a hug,” Asch says with a huff. It isn’t that hard a concept. “I know you're fine to stand.” He knows Luke thinks he’s fine to stand.

Finally Luke moves, setting a hand against Asch’s shoulder. He shoves, but not very hard, like he’s just testing. Asch doesn’t let go, though he has to tighten his grip a little to stay put. “What the hell makes you think I want a hug?”

Just for a moment, Asch thinks about the press of loneliness and darkness and resentment, and that one bright star out of reach. Then he carefully sets that thought aside, hoping Luke won’t catch it. “...Maybe I want a hug,” Asch says instead, small and petulant.

“So that makes it my job to give you one?” There’s something like a low growl in his voice. But all the same, Luke doesn’t make a further press or effort to shove Luke off. He just kind of... leaves his hand right there.

Secretly, Asch thinks, Luke is actually kind.

“You’re the only other one here,” he says. And then, carefully, biting the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t smile, he adds, “You’re not very good at it, though.”

“Shut up,” Luke grumbles. “I don’t care.”

It sounds pretty much like Luke actually does care. There's a moment or two where Luke is thinking; then Asch feels a careful press on his shoulders, neither against nor away. Luke has, apparently, set his hands on top of Asch’s shoulders and then just... left them there without doing anything else. It’s not quite a hug; but it’s not not a hug, either.

From Luke, Asch will happily take the lack of action as enough of an indication. Asch barely breathes, wary of disturbing that gentle touch. He has no idea why specifically it’s happening, he’s just guessing that it’s the challenge to Luke’s hugging skills that ultimately made the difference, but either way it’s progress. True, touchable progress.

“The problem with Guardian Field,” Luke says eventually, “is that you already know it.” Now he does push Asch away from him — if more gently than he might have once — and Asch goes with it, since he’s already pushing his luck and whatever change or help the gesture has been has already been made. “You’ll have to unlearn bad habits — have you even learned friend-or-foe markers, when you don’t really use fonic artes?” There’s a crisp sort of judgment in his tone, one Asch has trouble actually taking offense to. His skills are kind of a patchwork, he knows.

Asch shakes his head in answer. “I know about them, but there were kind of more important things to learn, when I don’t use anything that big.”

Not like Jade, who can casually sweep the elements across a battlefield to reshape it.

“Hunh.” Luke gives Asch a narrow-eyed, calculating look. “I doubt I could teach you here, like this, anyway.” There’s an odd sort of emptiness, like more words should go there. Asch stares at Luke, who stares back. 

“...When we get back,” Luke allows finally, not nearly as grudgingly as Asch was expecting. “I’ll see how hopeless you are then.”

When. When, not if. Asch grins all unintentionally when he processes that fully. They’re both definitely going to go back, Luke has admitted it. Luke is going to heal and then they’re going to go home and things will be better.

Asch isn’t naive enough to think things will be better immediately, just that they will be eventually. Still, eventually implies a later. There’s going to be a later for both of them. That’s enough to be joyful about.

In the silence of this contemplation, however, Luke starts to look pale again, and his breathing gets shallower. Asch starts toward him on instinct, not even sure what he’s going to do, only sure that he’s going to do _something_.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Luke snaps, short and breathless, and he takes a step back. “It’s fine. Stop looking at me like that.” Asch tries to make his face do something else, but if Luke’s responding scowl is anything to go off, he’s not especially successful about it.

“So what’s the problem with Guardian Field?” Asch presses, trying to turn the conversation. If Luke is focused on him, he’s not thinking about the other things. “I mean, you already said I already know it, but what bad habits could I have?”

“You learned by instinct, didn’t you? Building off whatever Van taught you, whatever texts you dug up, and what _felt_ right?” Luke’s lip curls over the last.

Asch shifts guiltily, because it’s true, but it also makes him sound like a slacker. “Guy helped. I learned some forms and artes from him, too.”

Luke waves a hand irritably. “Like I said, he’s built differently. Sigmund and Albert styles come from the same roots, but they’ve evolved differently. Your style’s come out piecemeal.”

Asch can’t really argue with that, but he’s not sure it’s a bad thing, either. It means Van couldn’t predict his moves any more.

It meant Luke couldn’t read his movements as well, either.

Asch stops thinking about that fight and keeps asking things. “That still doesn’t tell me what the problem with Guardian Field is, only what the problem with my sword skills is. Are you going to tell me?”

“Be patient.” Another scowl. “I’m getting to it. I don’t know how bad your founding for fonic artes is yet.”

“I’m not that stupid. I know about fonons and fon slots and fonic verses, even if I can’t really _use_ any fonic artes.” Asch sets himself to argue, because he could if he wanted to, it’s just that it didn’t make much sense to learn them at the time, given how much time it would take.

Luke turns his hand over, waves as if to say _go on_.

Asch stares blankly back. “What?”

“Tell me how you use Guardian Field.”

“Uh,” Asch says. “Well.”

Luke closes his eyes for a moment, squeezes them shut grimacing. When he focuses on Asch again it’s still scowling. “You just said you know how fonic artes work.”

“I know about _that_ ,” Asch protests. “Fonists draw fonons in through their fon slots and then join them together using a fon verse to make an arte.”

“Yes,” Luke says. “And? So? What are you doing when you use Guardian Field?”

“…But it’s not the same thing,” Asch says, still fairly blank. “I mean, I use fonons, but mostly I just let them flow through me with the shape of the arte, and it just kind of… happens.”

“And that is why we can’t start with Guardian Field,” Luke says crisply. He sounds as though he thinks he’s just won a major argument, while Asch can’t figure out how they got there in the first place. “You _are_ using a fonic arte. The physical form makes up the fon verse, but it’s still a fonic arte, you’re just — fumbling your way through it blindfolded. And you’re so used to that by now that it’s going to take forever for you to learn to do it the right way without falling into bad habits. So: if you want to learn healing artes, you’re going to have to start fresh.”

That’s disappointing. Disappointing, and also something of a roadblock to continuing conversation, since that sounds pretty final coming from Luke. “Oh,” Asch says, casting about for something else.

Luke still looks kind of pinched around the edges. Asch can see the fine lines of tension in Luke’s face and posture, and he doesn’t think he would always have been able to, not this same way. And while it’s nice to be able to read him even a little better, he’s still too worried about whatever’s going on with Luke’s body to really be pleased with the accomplishment right now.

This wasn’t happening earlier, even though Luke would have been more hurt earlier. Why is it happening _now_? Distracting Luke only keeps up with the problem, doesn’t stop it from happening. Like Luke said: it’s reacting, not acting.

“You’re thinking too hard again,” Luke says. “If you have a question, you might as well ask it. You’re not going to learn, otherwise.”

Asch slants his gaze away. If he calls Luke’s attention to Luke’s issues breathing, it’s just going to be harder for him. He has to figure this out himself, probably. But — then he has to come up with something else, fast. Healing artes… Guardian Field… well, it’s stupid, but he might learn something new. “The fourth fonon being ice _and_ water still doesn’t make sense.” He does know them, sort of. Especially when there’s been a lot of water thrown about, it’s easy to let that sense of water into the Guardian Field, to let it flow through and feel the whole thing crystallize outward. It still doesn’t make sense with how the fourth fonon feels when other people use it, what with how water acts. “It freezes when it combines with Guardian Field, but light doesn’t freeze things.”

“They’re different forms of the same thing,” Luke says, low and impatient. “That’s all it is.”

“No, I know that,” Asch says, trying not to get defensive and mostly failing. “I know ice is just frozen water, but you have to do something to it in the first place to get it there. And it’s not the temperature where you are when you’re using the arte, and it’s not the element you’re combining it with, but there’s got to be some reason it changes sometimes and doesn’t others, right? It’d be messed up if you could go down to the ocean and half the time it’d just be frozen.”

He’s not sure he’s making enough sense for Luke, honestly, but after a moment Luke’s expression clears. “That’s a structural issue,” he says. “When water freezes, it’s still the same fonons, they’re just in a different arrangement, and not moving as fast. It’s the same thing with artes. Different patterns and speed for the component fonons will make the difference between ice and water.”

Oh. That actually does make sense. Asch settles down, mulling that over. He couldn’t begin to reproduce it yet, but the underlying _concepts_ are sinking in, he’s sure.

Luke’s watching him suspiciously again, with that narrow-eyed observation that means — Asch is pretty sure — that Luke is trying to nail down what’s bothering him. Asch casts about for another question that’s less obvious or stupid, and can’t immediately come up with anything.

“Were your teachers that bad, or are you just trying to distract me?” Luke asks finally, still sounding dubious.

Asch can’t really take offense to that, since he has actually been trying to distract Luke. “A lot of them didn’t really get the amnesia thing,” Asch says. “So I was trying to learn the old stuff and the new stuff all at once, and all the things everyone takes for granted —”

It’s going to sound like he’s whining, and he’s pretty sure Luke doesn’t have much patience for Asch complaining about having everything Luke wanted. Asch hikes his shoulders up and looks away still trying to think of some other conversational direction.

He manages to come to the conclusion that it might even be better if Luke is further mad at him, since that’s technically a distraction, when Luke is suddenly in his line of sight, thumps him on the shoulder. Luke’s still pale, even for him, but the irritability in the set of his mouth is familiar more than strained.

Something in Asch relaxes, even though the irritation is directed at him.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your groveling is almost more annoying than you being completely oblivious.”

“I’m not _groveling_ ,” Asch retorts, shoving at Luke in return. Gently.

“Then stop being so delicate about it. It happened. I can take it.” Luke’s grimace has bared teeth in it.

“I’m just trying not to whine about — about having your life.” Asch persists mostly because this is important, and he’s already established it’ll be okay if Luke is mad at him. This is one of those things — it’s not his fault, maybe, that he took Luke’s place, but it was still him that was there. Even if he didn’t know what he was doing, even if he didn’t know _anything_ , he still took Luke’s place.

Luke takes a shallow breath and stops. There’s a quiet space, a rest, where they simply look at each other. Asch tries not to read too much into the creases at the corners of Luke’s eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Luke says finally, low and slow and dragging like it’s the last thing he wants to say. “You — do what you want. We _just_ talked about this, about you doing things for your own reasons.”

_It wasn’t your fault_. Asch finds himself stopped by those words, incapable for a moment of thinking of anything but that. He hasn’t once heard something like that from Luke. Hasn’t ever at all expected to, really. Of all the people who might ever absolve him of his various crimes —

Luke hadn’t been on the list, for all Asch’s hope that they’d find a way to live together. Somehow, Asch realizes, along the way he’d just assumed Luke wouldn’t be able to forgive him. Even if Luke came home.

Luke’s looking at him strangely now. Asch draws his breath in and it scrapes raw over the back of his throat, and he says the first thing in his head so the silence doesn’t stretch out too long. “What if what I want is to not whine about having what you wanted?”

It’s a twisted path of a sentence. Luke wrinkles his nose at Asch, curiously unguarded; Asch tries not to be too amused by the expression. It’s just… when Luke’s like this, more grumpy than actually angry or upset, Asch can see himself.

They’re different; but it isn’t so bad to be a little bit the same, either.

“Then do what you want,” Luke says, back to a more closed expression as quickly as the other had come. His tone goes back to gruff. “As long as you’re doing it for you, whatever.”

Because Asch has never quite gotten the hang of when not to push his luck, his mouth opens again and words fall out. “What’s wrong with wanting to do things for you? If I _was_ doing that for you, it wouldn’t be because you told me to or asked me to or whatever. It’d be because I wanted to. Because maybe I don’t want to — keep reminding you of where we’ve been, I guess.”

“That’s a very thin distinction.” Luke shifts as he says it, turning just a little away from Asch. Not like he’s disengaging; more like he’s just presenting a smaller target. “Don’t expect me to thank you for it.”

That had really been one of the farthest things from Asch’s mind. Luke, thanking him for something? Never happen. But he doesn’t need it, anyway. If he can make things easier on Luke, that’ll be enough. At least for now. The future will hold whatever the future holds.

As long as it holds them both.

“Yeah,” Asch says. “Okay. That’s fair. I’m still going to try not to be a jerk about it.”

Luke doesn’t say anything, just huffs. If some insult or complaint is there, it never makes it past thought. Which is actually… nice.

But: then there’s quiet again, the same frozen awkwardness. Better than it was; not easy yet, if it ever will be. And Asch can feel some fluttering panic leaping up into his chest whenever he hears something like a hitch in Luke’s breathing.

“I’m not going to die,” Luke says at length. Neither of them have moved very much. Maybe time has, maybe it hasn’t. “Stop looking at me like that. It’s — I’m healing. You look —”

Asch tries to school his features into something less wounded before Luke can come up with some appropriate insult. He mostly fails.

“You look like a lost puppy,” Luke says, consideringly snide. Asch bristles obligingly, but it’s not really anything as mean as he’d halfway been expecting. Luke ignores it and keeps talking, rightly judging Asch not to be any kind of threat. “Look, we weren’t in our bodies because they were too damaged. Yours is probably fine now.”

He doesn’t have to talk about the difference out loud. Asch was just destabilizing. Luke was destabilizing _and_ mortally wounded.

“And you want to go home,” Luke says. Hours or days or however long ago it would have been bitter; now he just sounds tired. “And you won’t go without me, will you.”

Asch shakes his head. Then the weight of it hits. “Wait, is this my fault?”

Luke’s gaze is heavy on him, but he mirrors Asch, shakes his head before guilt can gnaw too much at Asch’s throat. “I’m guessing. And it’s not your fault I —”

_Died_.

The word hangs clearly enough without either of them saying it aloud.

While it’s nice to be told something isn’t his fault, this is one of those things Asch kind of feels _is_. He fought Luke. He left Luke there. Luke told him to, Luke wouldn’t take no for an answer… but Asch still left him.

Luke keeps talking once the heaviness of what hasn’t been said fades. “I still need to heal. That’s all. Being here like this is keeping me alive until I can breathe on my own, I think. It just feels — wrong.”

Asch doesn’t think either of them likes having this conversation, and yet they keep talking about it. He shifts from foot to foot, and it takes a lot of effort not to fidget any more than that. “But you’re going to be okay.”

“I’ll be alive.” Asch notes that Luke is not promising _okay_. “I _am_ alive,” Luke corrects more firmly, like he’s daring Asch to argue.

That’s really not something Asch wants to argue. Maybe Luke just needs to be defying someone.

“Are you sure we can’t practice healing artes here?” Asch asks wistfully. Then at least he’d be doing something, anything at all. “Maybe we could help you heal faster.”

“We’re _in Lorelei_ ,” Luke says. “Or — a remnant of it, at least. I don’t think _more_ of the seventh fonon is going to help at this point.”

Right. Asch entirely remembered that. He colors, hunching his shoulders up. “There has to be something we can do.”

“There is,” Luke says flatly. “Wait.”

As Luke turns away in earnest now, Asch grumbles, ruffles up his own hair till it sticks out in all directions. Back to powerless, again, after everything? No. There’s an endless parade of childish justifications for his frustration here — it’s not fair, it’s dumb, he just wants to go _home_ — but none of them are going to get anything done. Fair doesn’t have any effect on how fast Luke heals.

Asch still hates the waiting.

And worse, when he stands still, when he actually tries to be patient and simply aware or whatever, he starts — or he thinks he starts — to feel his body again. He’s _tired_ , with a heavy ache dragging at his bones and a low thrum resonating under his ribs somewhere. He doesn’t think he’s going to fall apart at any moment, but his fonons separating hadn’t really felt like all that much. How would he tell?

Asch feels his chest rise and fall, and he shivers and takes off after Luke intead of standing still.

They _released_ Lorelei. The point was that Lorelei would go into the fon belt, where no one would be able to use it like Van had. If they’re in Lorelei, then where are they physically?

And if they’re not actually in Lorelei, if this is only a remnant of that vast mass of seventh fonons, then it’s probably going to run out eventually.

“What are you doing,” Luke says when Asch falls into step with him. They’re not really going anywhere; it’s walking just to walk, for the idea of movement. Because standing still will drive one or both of them mad.

Asch shrugs gracelessly, links his arms behind his head. “I’m bored.”

“How is that my problem?”

Considerately, Asch doesn’t point out that they’re the only people here, and one of them going stir-crazy will definitely be the other’s problem. “You’re the one that said all we have to do is wait.”

“That didn’t translate to _bother me_ about it.” Luke folds his arms — grimaces faintly, which Asch only catches by virtue of having been constantly flicking little sidelong glances at him — and then keeps walking. They get nowhere. “Fine. What do you want?”

Asch can’t tell if that’s Luke being too tired to argue, or if it’s a curt assent to being bothered, as he puts it. Either way, now he has to come up with something. His mind stalls, finally spits out the most inane thing possible. “What kind of food do you like?”

Luke stops, and turns specifically so he can stare at Asch, obviously not convinced he heard right. “What?”

“Food,” Asch says, starting with the part he’s assuming is the hardest for Luke to understand. This was just an excuse to talk a few seconds ago, but now he’s actually curious. “I know it sounds stupid, but I was wondering. Are our tastes built-in or not, stuff like that.”

“Hmph.”

There’s no immediate answer forthcoming, but Luke looks like he might actually be considering it. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. It’s begrudging, but he’s saying things, which is as far as Asch is concerned the more important part. “I… used to care more, but Daath as a whole subsists on the charity of others. There isn’t a lot of room to just wait for what you like.”

It’s not scornful. He talks like that’s just the way things are.

Luke’s expression does something weird, then, a crinkling around the corners of his eyes that isn’t really careworn or judging. “I guess it’s a good thing they don’t come by more octopus.”

Somehow, this feels like the most unguarded, honest thing Asch has ever heard Luke say, despite all the admissions they’ve made about living and dying. Asch lets out an explosive sigh, swinging his arms gleefully. “Yes. It’s _disgusting_. Who wants to eat tentacles?”

There’s a dry, unwilling sort of a chuckle from Luke, which Asch doesn’t comment on but instantly folds away as a memory to treasure later. “You’d be a bad replacement if you liked different things.”

Asch tries to take that without the sting. He shrugs uncomfortably. “Yeah, well.” He lifts his left hand. There’s no way his dominant hand has gone unnoticed, even with minimal comment on it. “There’s a lot of stuff they just chalked up to trauma, I guess.”

“Tch.” Luke focuses; looks away the second after that. “If you’re trying to help anything, you’re not.”

“…Yeah,” Asch says. This is not his best thought out plan. “I’m sorry.”

Luke huffs. “I told you. It’s not your fault Van put you in my place. Don’t make me think twice about that opinion.”

Given the option, Asch decides shutting up for a moment or two might be the best course of action.

He hangs on tenterhooks for a minute or three, shifting faintly on the spot, not sure what else to do or say and certain only that he’d rather not leave Luke alone, or himself be alone in this place and situation. “Hey, Luke —”

“How many times am I going to have to tell you to just _out_ with it,” Luke says, riding right over what Asch was about to ask.

“— Huh?”

Luke spins, takes Asch by the shoulders firmly but not altogether unkindly. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, _this_ time, because I don’t think you’re observant enough to work it out on your own.”

It is the most complimentary insult Asch has ever experienced from Luke.

“You keep — doing this. Talking around things because you think I’m going to be angry at you.”

Luke isn’t completely wrong. Asch is just embarrassed Luke’s seen through it so easily. He guesses it makes sense, but his ears are still burning. “Well,” Asch says, and hesitates because the exact topic is making Luke angry. There’s nothing else for it, though; he’s out of ideas for distractions. “You are. Almost all the time. Or, I guess, it seems like you are?”

“Because you exist,” Luke says, a knee-jerk sort of an answer. This close it’s easy to see the process of reconsideration on his face. “I hate what you represent. And you taking my place. And —”

“I get it.”

Luke doesn’t let go of him, but nods shortly and changes tacks. “It’s easy to be angry,” he says, “but it’s not your fault.” This he says like he has to remind himself of that fact, like it’s as much for Luke’s own benefit as for Asch’s. “And you’re — trying. I guess. That helps.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Shut up.”

Asch, who could not entirely help himself despite knowing better, shuts up again. Luke stares at him meaningfully, but keeps going before long. “My point is that when you try to distract me from what you’re really trying to say, not only is it _blindingly obvious_ , but it feels like you’re trying to lie to me, not — whatever it is you actually think you’re doing. It’s like Van, just more clueless. And it _pisses me off_.”

Perhaps obviously, Asch hasn’t really thought of it that way. He kind of thought he was trying for tactful. Or at least, not being a jerk. It’s just that — bringing up uncomfortable things bluntly seems rude, and he’s trying to learn not to be rude, and also he doesn’t actually want to upset Luke. And —

He’s making excuses. Asch goes back to basics. How would he feel, if he knew someone close to him was talking around something but didn’t want to bring it up? Mostly, he thinks, frustrated. Maybe hurt. Definitely not happy about it.

“Okay,” Asch says eventually, shifting but not trying to free himself. “Yeah. I get it. But — you’re not going to be happy with me worrying about you out loud all the time, either.”

“Of course I’m not.” They scowl at each other, then, Luke bristling but seemingly unwilling to walk away from the conversation like he has been. “Would you be?”

Asch is about to object, but he realizes he can’t. Most of his actions since he’d learned his fonons were separating were based in not letting his friends find out. So they wouldn’t worry about him. So the time they had left would be… happy. Happy enough, anyway. He closes his mouth on the denial and sighs. “It’s not like I can just stop worrying, either. You were dying.”

“Well, try,” Luke snaps, and his expression creases at the corners with something like pain, and he lets go of Asch’s shoulders and steps backward. “Was there some reason you came over here fretting, or not?”

Asch teeters on the balance between honesty and not fretting at Luke, and makes a snap decision. “I think I start feeling my body, when I stop long enough,” he says, all in a rush, tripping over his words here and there. “And you said yours doesn’t feel like it’s ready yet. And this is — we think we’re in Lorelei, right? But we were trying to release Lorelei to the fon belt, and if we’re in it why can’t we _hear_ it? You said it might be a remnant — a leftover concentration of seventh fonons or whatever, right? But what if those run out?”

What if those run out and Luke isn’t all the way healed yet? The thought of all this hope crashing, of not being able to bring Luke home with him after all, shakes Asch the worse now for having said it aloud.

Improbably, Luke seems to soften. The way he looks at Asch now is a weirdly heavy regard for its relative gentleness, and Asch doesn’t know what to make of it, or why Luke watching him is suddenly _more_ than it was. “This space is still here,” Luke says, gesturing up and around them. “I think — if these seventh fonons were in danger of running out — we’d probably see more of where we are physically. Or there would be some kind of instability.”

This sounds like guesswork to Asch. “Both of us are feeling our bodies more than we were, though. Isn’t that an instability, if you’re not ready for it? You’ve been having a hard time breathing for a while now.”

Luke turns his head a little to the side. He doesn’t seem to have an answer. “…What is yours feeling like?”

Asch doesn’t really want to go back, but he stills himself, testing, and turns his attention inward. Or — outward? Whichever it is. He thinks at the part of him that’s him, but not here, the part that drags at his bones.

He thinks he can feel how he’d fall back into it. He shies around the edges of that pull, wary, not at all wanting to go without Luke. “It’s heavy,” Asch says aloud. “Maybe that’s just because we’ve been like this for — however long we have. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but I don’t know how I’d tell if my fonons are still separating or not.” He makes a face. “I think I’m going to be sore, either way.”

There’s a low _hah_ from Luke, who does not sound impressed. “If sore is the worst you have, you’ll be fine.”

Right. Asch maybe isn’t going to whine about that. It’s going to suck, yeah, but one of them had a bunch of swords in his chest and that someone is not him.

“Anyway, it’s more than I could feel at all, a while ago.” Asch hesitates again over asking Luke how he’s feeling, wondering if asking Luke to pay attention to his body is a good idea, given the previous problems. Maybe it’s better if they don’t.

But when he looks over at Luke, Luke’s eyes are half-closed and he’s taking shallow little breaths. Damn.

In a few seconds, though, Luke opens his eyes. He’s paler in the face and his breathing is generally too quick, but he’s not falling over. “It’s — better,” he manages. He presses a hand to his chest as though feeling it out. “A little. Not there yet. I can — _feel_ things knitting together.”

He doesn’t specify what things. Asch does not at all want to know the specifics. “So it really is just up to waiting?” he asks, trying very hard only to ask and not whine. At Luke’s terse nod Asch paces a tight little circle, heaves a great sigh, and finally stops. “But you’re — okay.”

“I’m _fine_.” Even if it’s true, it still sounds like an automatic denial. Luke looks away when Asch gives him a pointed look. “…Like I said, I’ll be fine. I’ll live. Happy now?”

“Yeah, actually.” Asch links his hands behind his head again, and when Luke glances back, presumably to grumble about his cheer, Asch is grinning at him. His heart is light and his face aches for smiling and he doesn’t _care_.

Luke scoffs, but it doesn’t sound like his heart is in it. “I don’t understand you at all.”

Asch isn’t really sure how to explain himself, either. He stretches out, shrugs, drops his hands to his side. “I changed, I guess. I don’t think I’d have gotten this far without everyone else. I’d still be wondering who I was. Tear had to point some pretty obvious things out to me. But… I know who I am, now. And whatever I was meant for, whatever the Score says, my life has the meaning _I_ bring to it. So there’s room for you there, because I say there is.” That’s all that has to mean anything, right? If Luke and Luke can co-exist, everyone else will just have to follow along. “Your life hasn’t been fair, and I can’t do anything about that, but we can change the future. So that’s all it is.”

The way Luke shakes his head is incredulous. He laughs quietly, but it isn’t unkind, just disbelieving. “You’re still a child. You see things so _simply_.”

“Maybe you see things as more complicated than they are,” Asch returns. It’s not that he doesn’t know there’s nuance. It’s just that, deep down, the core sentiment really is a simple one. Live, and have hope, and keep living. Be kind, and prevent suffering, and build the future better than it is. “Anyway, I’m seven, what’s your excuse?”

This draws another real laugh out of Luke, the first one Asch has really _intended_ to get, and it feels like a larger victory than anything else so far in their talks. “You’ll have no head for politics. I guess I’ll have to head back with you for a while.”

That takes several moments to sink in. Asch is busy getting his back up about the insult before he gets the good side of what Luke has said, and when he does he lights up. Luke’s going with him. Luke’s volunteering not just to live, but to stay, in his grouchy, can’t-express-positive-emotion kind of way.

Asch lunges for him. The resulting flail draws an undignified squawk from Luke, but he condescends to drape his arms over Asch’s shoulders when it becomes clear that Asch isn’t going for a fight, just a hug.

It’s gratifying, to feel Luke relaxing by stages. He’s re-learning that human contact can be a good thing.

Natalia’s going to be _so happy_. Asch dares to rest his chin on Luke’s shoulder. He’s the perfect height for it, naturally.

“Don’t get comfortable,” Luke grumbles. Asch completely ignores this in favor of getting comfortable. Luke’s heart beats just as strongly as his, Asch is sure of it. It has to.

He spends some time there, since Luke isn’t immediately dislodging him, and he listens to Luke’s breaths. Still shallow, a little raspy here and there, but nothing like the labored terror they were at the beginning of all this. Asch can believe Luke will be all right. It is, in fact, really tempting to just close his eyes and rest there. If he’s holding on to Luke, he won’t wind up back in his body without Luke, right?

That makes some kind of sense if he doesn’t think about it too much.

“Are you thinking about Tear?” Luke asks eventually, breaking what’s actually been a very peaceable silence.

Asch lifts his head a fraction, if only so he can hear more clearly. “I wasn’t. Why?”

“…I can hear the hymn.”

The hymn. Asch holds his breath, and a low background hum he’d barely realized was there transforms into notes he recognizes. It’s quiet, but it’s there. “…Where’s that coming from?”

It’s a pitch that sounds like Tear. Lorelei is deeper, when Lorelei has spoken or sung at all. True, Asch has to assume the aggregate sentience of _sound_ can match any pitch it desires, it’s just…

It sounds like Tear.

“I don’t know,” Luke says, irritated. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Well,” Asch says, and tries to think it through. “If it isn’t you, and it isn’t me, and it probably isn’t Lorelei, and the space we’re in hasn’t changed at all…”

Luke nods slowly with each eliminated possibility. “Then you think it’s actually Tear.”

Well. Yes. “I don’t know what else it could be,” Asch says. “But if that _is_ her, where is she?”

Resounding silence says that neither one of them knows. Asch strains his ears listening all the same. He misses everyone. Not that Luke isn’t great, and he’s so, so relieved that he and Luke have had the chance to just talk, and learn about each other… It’s just that Asch misses his friends, too. Even if bringing Luke back with him might be a bit uneven. Even if some things will be hard. He wants to. He can barely wait.

“Hey,” Luke says. And, “ _Hey._ ”

“Huh?”

Luke curls his fingers into the fabric at the back of Asch’s collar, like he’s grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. At least he doesn’t shake. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Getting transparent. Start using your head, instead. If we can hear Tear from here, what does that mean?”

Asch spends longer than Luke would probably prefer wondering about _getting transparent_ , but all Asch can see of his own body looks solid enough, and he doesn’t really feel like stepping away from Luke yet. Especially not when Luke isn’t pushing him away. “Uhhhh. Well, if we can hear her, then… she has to be somewhere we can hear her.”

Mercifully, Luke does not jump on how stupid that sounds. Asch swears he has a point, even if it sounds dumb. He wrinkles his nose, keeps talking. “So she’s either somewhere near our physical bodies, or… somewhere the sound can travel to us because of some other property of her location or ours?”

“Right,” Luke agrees. “Keep going.”

“We don’t know where we are exactly,” Asch hedges, “so that’s something we can’t guess one way or another. How else would sound get to us… um. Maybe the sephiroth? But it’s the hymn. The Grand Fonic Hymn. If Lorelei _is_ involved, and the hymn is the proof of Yulia’s pact, then that could change everything. Tear could be basically anywhere.”

“Use your head. She couldn’t just sing at Van from anywhere.”

Asch shakes off a phantom head-tap. “Yeah, but Lorelei’s free, not in Van any more, so it’s different. And we don’t know what it hears, really. Right?”

Luke harrumphs, but he doesn’t have anything more to say about that.

“So we don’t know.” Asch is taking the silence to mean Luke knows just as little as he does, at least on that specific topic. “Maybe why she’s singing is important?”

The hymn resonates between them, like a hook under Asch’s sternum.

“Well?” Luke prods him, if gently. “You know her. What are you thinking?”

Asch isn’t sure what he’s thinking, exactly, only that he knows he’s missing something. “It’s the Grand Fonic Hymn. It isn’t about artes any more. It’s just… the proof of the pact, right?”

“You already said that.” But Luke hums faintly under his breath, and it sounds like a thinking sound. “You think she’s… reaching out, maybe?”

Now he just sounds dubious. Asch shrugs. “Maybe she’s asking a question.”

He doesn’t know. It’s a guess without a lot of basis in fact. But there’s something in the song. Something he can’t put a finger on, but something that’s growing anyway. It makes Asch want to go home more than ever, and he can definitely feel his body now, more clearly than he had before, but he can’t leave Luke. He won’t. He refuses.

“If you yell it any louder I’m going to go deaf in the brain,” Luke murmurs, not unkindly, and he ruffles Asch’s hair with a touch so light Asch half thinks he’s imagining it. “Go, idiot. I can feel how much you want to.”

The only reason Asch doesn’t object there is that _idiot_ sounds fond. He spares a few seconds to treasure it before moving on. “I said I wasn’t going without you, and I meant it.”

A grumpy huff stirs his hair. There’s nothing else. Asch thinks about options. “You could come with me,” he tries finally, since he really does want to go and the waiting is making him want to climb the walls. “You brought me with you, back then. Remember? Same thing.”

He can probably do that, right? Right. It can’t be that hard.

“What makes you think I have any interest in going and seeing Tear?”

Right. Asch just kind of assumes Tear will lead to the others. He wants to see Tear — of course he does, so much, he promised — but more than that there’s the promise of home all tied up in seeing her, too. Luke, for obvious reasons that Asch has nevertheless just remembered, does not have these associations. “Will you come with me?”

They both hesitate.

“Please?” Asch adds.

“You’re going to be intolerable if I don’t, aren’t you.” Resigned, Luke drops his head briefly to Asch’s shoulder. He startles up and steps back only a second or two after, like he’s only just realized what he’s done. “I can’t. I’m not healed yet. I would have to be with you, in your body.”

It’s a shame Luke feels like he has to back away, but it’s still progress. He seems warmer than he’s ever been. Asch grins at him, and the expression feels like it might jump off his face with joy. “That’s why I’m offering. So we can both see what’s happening. Do you think you’re that far away from being fully healed?”

Luke shrugs a little. “I don’t know how well I can breathe yet. I don’t want to try without help until I’m sure.”

Neither of them moves. The hymn resonates. It occurs to Asch finally that, without his coat and Luke’s tabard and all the assorted armor and weapons, they’re both down to just black underlayers. They probably look more similar than they would if they were actually trying.

“Well?” Luke says, gesturing at Asch as though to urge him onward. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it. She’s not going to sing forever, presumably.”

Yeah. Luke’s right. It’s just, Asch has no idea how to invite him in mentally, not really. So he does the next best thing, and gathers himself up to fling his arms around Luke again, and in that sense of holding close Asch lets his eyes close and this time really _reaches_ for the heaviness of his body, for the sense of the hymn that pulls —

Every single one of Asch’s joints ache and he’s lying on something exceptionally hard. But: he’s him, and he’s in his body, and he’s alive. And he can still hear the hymn, even if it’s something he feels more than he hears. Slowly he tries to lever himself off the — ground? Stone? It’s stone. His muscles mostly work.

His hair is everywhere. … His hair is _long_. Does Asch have the right body? He shoves his hair back and catches a glimpse of — Luke. Oh. Yeah. That’s Luke, even though he never looks that relaxed, and he’s stretched out on stone just like Asch must have been.

There’s light around them, but it’s not sixth-fonon light. It’s a fuzzy warmth like home, like a song, and Asch lifts one hand to look at it in the light and finds himself pretty sure it’s the seventh fonon.

That makes sense, too.

_Are you done being mystified by your own limbs_ , a voice very like his but grumpier says in the back of his head, and automatically Asch looks to where Luke’s lying down. He manages to scramble to his feet for the purpose of heading over there, looking Luke over. He’s… not breathing, not really. Asch panics for a moment, but when he rests a hand on Luke’s chest he feels the solid beat of Luke’s heart.

His own heart drops out of his throat. Okay. Luke’s alive. That’s what matters.

_Are you going to follow the hymn or not?_

So Asch’s priorities were a little Luke-centered. Whatever. He draws himself up, shoving his hair back again. It keeps falling everywhere; he’d forgotten what it was like to have long hair. “I can still hear it,” he says aloud, in a voice rough with disuse. “Not nearby, but…”

_But what_?

Asch swears he can feel Luke prodding him. “I don’t know how to get there,” he admits, wincing. “I… I think she’s near one of the sephiroth?”

If he could make a hyperresonance like he and Tear had accidentally, that time, he might be able to get there, but hyperresonance to inscribe a passage ring and hyperresonance to fling himself across Auldrant are, as far as he’s concerned, two completely different things.

Luke makes a frustrated, impatient noise somewhere in the back of Asch’s head. It doesn’t come with a headache, for once. _It’s the same principle. You just —_

There’s an impression of math and resonance and flowing along with the fonons.

“Why don’t you do it, then,” Asch grumbles, and the impulsive mental shove to put Luke in front is a lot easier than anything else.

Luke flails Asch’s arms wildly. “What are you _doing_ ,” he demands — aloud.

_It’s easier if you do it. Since we’re trying to get there, right?_ Asch tries to radiate calm. This is okay, he’s putting Luke in charge on purpose. _Go on. … Please?_

Luke takes a bit of time settling himself, since it’s a different body, but they have a goal, after all. “Fine,” he says. They’re mirror images, there shouldn’t be that much of a difference between their voices, but somehow he still sounds different to Asch. “I want you to pay attention.”

_I’m paying attention. Okay? Let’s go. Let’s just — go._ Asch does his mental best to concentrate. He’s still in his body, he could still, he thinks, control himself if he wanted to — but he doesn’t. He just plans to watch Luke move fonons.

There’s a rushing and a humming, and the same excitement of seventh fonons reacting with each other. Asch watches intently. He’s not sure he’d be able to do it himself — yet — but it feels right. And when Luke turns it loose, when they’re flung wide with the force of it to somewhere else entirely, he knows he’s going to feel selenia flowers before their feet are on the ground.

And, best of all, there are people there.

The last strains of the hymn fade. Luke stands paralyzed, and Asch doesn’t have the presence of mind to step forward and move on his own, either. Everyone’s here. Why are they all here, in Tataroo Valley? It doesn’t make any sense.

But they’re here. Natalia’s golden hair and the moonlight reflecting off Jade’s glasses, and Anise shadowed by Tokunaga’s bulk and Guy with one hand on his sword, and Tear —

Tear turns back, and any ability Asch had to step forward briefly vanishes. He wants so much to move forward that he can’t seem to do anything about it, can barely even process that she’s said something, and in the end it’s Luke that takes that first step.

“I promised someone,” he says, and Asch murmurs the same thing in the back of his head.

They both promised. They’re both keeping those promises.

Together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is, naturally, where we catch up to the end cutscene.
> 
> Thanks for coming with me, folks. I've been working on this one since summer 2017-- it's been kind of a long ride in learning to Finish Things. I'm happy to finally share it.
> 
> If you have questions about worldbuilding or why I've done the things I've done, I'm always happy to ramble about such things, and I don't bite. At worst, I have opinions about happy endings and story structure. ;) Cheers!


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